Dictionary of War

Virutous War

2009-10-11T20:35+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 16:00 Technology in the service of virtue has given rise to a global form of virtual violence, virtuous war. In virtuous war, made-for-TV wars and Hollywood war movies blur, military war games and computer video games blend, mock disasters and real accidents collide, producing on screen a new configuration of virtual power, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.

Urban Warfare - Gar Smith

2009-10-01T18:06+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 15:30

Re-appropriating the city of fear - Fiona Jeffries

2009-09-30T19:03+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 13:30 Fear is seen to be one of the defining political emotions of late modernity. Filmmakers, sociologists, artists, philosophers and pundits see fear everywhere. If fear has become a way of life, the contemporary city is seen by many to be one of its most prominent and productive social laboratories. But while fear is seen to be so politically significant, the way it is studied often both naturalizes and exteriorizes fear from politics. As a result, fear's more complex and antagonistic status as both a social relation and an arena of political action is submerged.

Wounded Cities - Ida Susser and Jan Schneider

2009-09-29T17:43+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 18:00

When a riot becomes a war - Suketu Mehta

2009-09-29T17:39+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 17:30

Explosion Implosion: war in our time - Susan Crile

2009-09-29T17:38+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 17:00 In EXPOLSION IMPOSION: War in Our Time, I show four series of paintings and works on paper that are concerned with war and/ or terrorism and torture. I talk about its affect on society the society. The four series are, FIRES OF WAR, 9-1, ABU GHRAIB: Abuse of Power and IN OUR NAME: Black Sites and Guantanamo. These works explore the sensory and experiential nature of violence, war and torture as distinct from their conceptual and historical dimensions.

War Games - Ashley Dawson

2009-09-29T17:28+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 16.30 When Schiller penned his Aesthetic Letters shortly following the French Revolution, he saw the "play drive" as a virtuous alternative to the violence that had engulfed the world of politics, a force capable of reconciling the conflict between human beings' material, sensuous nature and their capacity for reason. Much of the subsequent history of aesthetic theory hinges on this vision of creativity as a redemptive alternative to the fallen world of modernity. But gaming is serious business.

The Wall - Richard Sennett

2009-09-29T17:22+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 15:00

Annexpression - Tony Conrad

2009-09-29T16:49+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 14:30 The unexpected degree to which having a job is not only selling your time, but is also selling your voice. The annexpression job divide is a ragged edge, in which those with expressive options overlap with job holders in certain ways; still, the overwhelming preponderance of those with jobs have sold their voices almost completely, as their outlook has been annexed to corporate enterprise - and as they have moreover introjected the workplace values, political postures, and social outlooks of their employers.

Marketing War - Danny Kaplan

2009-09-29T16:44+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 14:00 In times of war commercial considerations present new ways to promote culturally available sentiments of nationalism, previously sustained by state institutions. As governments withdraw from managing emergency services this vacuum may be taken up by private agents, particularly at the local-municipal level. This question of marketing war is examined in a case-study of a commercial radio station in the city of Haifa during the 2006 Lebanon War.

Pigeon - Gediminas Urbonas

2009-09-29T16:42+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 13:00 "La colombe qui fait bourn!" The dove that goes boom! Similar to other animals pigeon is lending out their features to the war techniques. Like Trojan horse and Medici’s giraffe, Warhorses and Elephants, Durer’s Rhinoceros and bomber dolphins , pigeons become devices that share their belonging to both – nature and techne. Animals lending their skin to the camouflage patters, logic of their movements to the one of robots, their muscles to carrier of ammunitions, their senses to control protocols, their species names to name technologies or war.

Not-not-war - Rosalind C. Morris

2009-09-29T16:34+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 12:00

Information - Ted Byfield

2009-09-29T16:33+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 11:30 Information is, first and foremost, an English-language word with a checkered past -- in hermeneutics, jurisprudence, physics, genetics. Its current use is partly defined by context, communications, and partly by the baggage it carries from its prior incarnations, which are irreconcilable. Those tensions are precisely what lends the word the dynamism it needs to function as it does, as a sort of universal solvent.

Cold war planning - Jennifer S. Light

2009-09-29T16:32+00:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 11:00 Cold war physical planning is frequently invoked in contemporary discussions about post 9/11 urban planning in the US, but another equally important/pervasive aspect of collaborations between defense planners and urban planners in the Cold War era is forgotten in these discussions. I'll talk about several technology-focused collaborations in the 1960s and suggest why this more expansive definition of Cold War planning history is important and relevant for thinking about cities and war today.

The Informal

2008-10-31T01:15+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008

Accident - Ravi Sundaram

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 24th 2008 The accident has been seen as an origin myth for a new prosthetic enhancement to the body in its drive to war (Marinetti). Recently, Paul Virilio calls the accident the diagnostic of technology, its inherent drive to catastrophe. What about the accident as the image of everyday danger in a city? Not an outside, not an inside.

Cold, Coldness, the War of Coldness - Shih-Chieh Ilya Li

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 24th 2008 As the Russian army invaded the Georgian territory, right in the same day China celebrating its "one world, one (Olympic) dream", mainstream media soon were flooded with the term "new cold war". Russia is back, and right now United States of America is facing its most serious, urgent, catastrófico economic Recession that is going to influence the world. For the western journalist, cold war was over decades ago, and the "new" is coming back to haunt the world with it's new axis, new friends, and new competition. But there are certain places on the earth that still under the same old coldness. Just like the South Eastern Asian jungle where Japanese soldiers hided into and waited for long term resistance, people there just missed the institutional de-frozen message: the Emperor/tennō/Mikado's radio lecture announcing "unconditional surrender". Post-war period after World War II is called "Cold War", and when is the end of "Cold War"? Are we officially providing any equipment, or any institutionalized effort, to terminate the coldness? In post WWII situation, Taiwan was deemed the important freedom fighting fortress on the Pacific Ocean. An un-sinkable aircraft carrier. A free China, China outside of China. A kind of democracy window to let people look into the iron curtained Chinese mankind. Taiwanese development was deemed strategically aligned with US's interests. Embracing the financial (mostly in the form of raw material, just like the extended market for USA national production) support and accompanied ideologies, we are connected with the center of the war. Show our loyalty, going nowhere but embracing the superpower, even the enlightenment is coming from most US then coming back to our own people. Taiwan is not only a free China, better China, civilized China, but also an unsinkable refrigerator. Taiwan is a cold generating device. Taiwan is institutionalized into the generator of our own coldness, and help in sustaining other people's coldness. When our enlightened intellectuals coming back to Taiwan, they found Taiwanese people are so "cold", not responding to external International situations: don't go out to protest against the Viet Nam war, for example. How do we react to this situation? We don't even know who we are! The only thing we know is to produce things. We are hardworking people, and we are doing really good. As no one is officially announcing "the cold war is over" (they don't announce it when it began neither!) , the coldness generating device, the unsinkable freedom carrier on the Pacific Ocean, is still hardworkingly outputting its coldness. No one yet to check the ruins so very few people know it's still working. Some politician knows the product these people produced, so smartly find a way to utilize these coldness-related products. At least to better their political lives. I would like to propose a research/re-search into coldness, to uncover the cold war's technical sides: cold war's instrumentality, how did it terminated or even everlasting? What are the strategies and tactics of cold war initiator / collaborators? Do they know we are the children of coldness, and those are even extending to today?

Loyalty - Sam de Silva

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 The tactic of killing in the name of loyalty places the non-fighter, the peacemaker - the journalist, the ordinary person - in to the war and the zone of fire. The Tamil Tigers, a militant group, branded terrorists by the US, Europe and Canada, has a track record of killing people from their own ethnicity, who challenge their strategy. Journalists who write critically against the Government or contribute to "demoralising" the army are attacked, disappeared and killed. The concept of "loyalty" will be explored through the Sri Lankan experience, a bloody war over land and power has been waging for over 25 years. Are you with us or against us

Blank Space - Annett Busch and Florian Schneider

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 24th 2008 "To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples..." With these words the "King of the Belgians", Leopold II. welcomed the participants of the "Geographical Conference" that took place in September 1876 at the Royal Palace in Brussels. Only nine years later nearly one million square miles in central Africa, an area that Joseph Conrad once called "the blankest of all blank spaces", has been named the "Congo Free State". For the next 23 years it was the private property of Leopold II. During that period at least 8 million people lost their lives under a regime of terror and exploitation.

Waiting - Brett Neilson

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 War is mostly about waiting. In strategy there is delay. In fear there is hesitation. In engagement there is exit. Languor, boredom, nullity: waiting around for orders, mobilization or attack. Capture and detention, setbacks and impediments, quagmires and fog: in all there is a tendency to confusion and deferral. Far from the politics of decision and the friend/enemy divide, waiting reminds us of all that is uncertain or undecidable in war. And if, by other means, war is politics, it signals the importance, perhaps the virtue, of patience in political life. Waiting, in other words, is a register of all that cannot be won or lost in war. Above all, it is a tonality of experience triggered by a sense of finitude, by the expectation that war will end. But what becomes of this expectation when war becomes permanent, perpetual or infinite? In a war without limits of time or place, what is the sense of waiting?

Insulation - Ashok Sukumaran

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 Insulation is the silent twin of "mediation". It is the wrapper of refusal that surrounds and protects an act of transmission, of exchange, or of transport. It is then a systemic, "objective" part of the ways in which we distribute ideas, information, and materials. When visible, insulation provides an image in outline, of the symbolic order: shapes that tell the story of distribution, mark the boundaries of commodities, their flows, and provide a surface for continuous conflict... a Wall across which to imagine and produce an outside, and an interior. But then, do not these very materials also produce the shelters, camouflages, isolations, prophylactics, inductions and touch-me-nots that mark the conceptual limits of an era of advancing "networks" ? Could there be a political possibility here, a line of defence? Lenin once made a proposal to melt down enough church bells to provide the copper conductors necessary to wire yet un-electrified Soviet villages. In a contemporary response, we should be melting down and reusing things with quite the opposite properties, offering a different articulation of what is urgent, and a different order of sacrifice.

Zoom - Shaina Anand

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 ZOOM begins with a popular film from the 1970's that was said to define the "look of the 20th Century". We wonder about the powers of then, and the powers of now. The look acts at collapsable distances, and varying focal lengths. The captured subjects will not know whose eyes their bodies will receive, (even though they will imagine it), in which galaxies their images will wander, in blackholes of memory or as data-stamps of unique flesh. At various levels of X, equations emerge, governing the relationship between the subject/ actor and the explicit or phantasmic, but always-powerful "viewer". We take a closer look at some of these ratios and their registers of violence: in visual anthropology, CCTV, iris scans and more.

Dark Matter - Gregory Sholette

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 24th 2008 Sholette's research into politically-engaged artists' collectives raises the following proposition: cultural economies are secretly dependent upon a sphere of hidden social production involving cooperative networks, systems of gift exchange, unwaged labor, and collective forms of practice that act as a type of missing mass or dark matter, which the art world typically refuses to acknowledge. Thanks in large part to the spread of digital networks, however, this dark matter is getting brighter. By looking at more than 30 years of contemporary artists' collectives, Sholette's research attempts to map this materializing missing mass politically, as part of a broader history from below.

War and Multitude - Ali Akay

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 Leaving behind the 20th century, the 21st century has appeared with two directions. On the one hand, a hope for the world with more freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall; on the other hand, the hegemony of capital which has been named ‘Empire’ is as the imperial system based on the military operations and the occupations over multitude. A reaction has been created by the opponents which are called and conceptualized as ‘Multitude’ in a sensibility which has occurred not only with the former leftist anarcho-gochist groups but also with an ecological market rethinks a multi-dynamics ecological world and unites with multitude. These multi-dynamics come out as the players of today’s dictionary of war. In this political situation, there is an international immigration practice emerging from the movements of labor and capital becomes too mobile, so that it makes the fact of hybridization composing with multiculturalism, post-colonial discourse and the “third space” possible. At this point, by turning to a conceptual approach, it is proper to look at the grammar of war in the dictionary of the thought of Tarde in the beginning of the 20th century.

Ambient Fears - Nikos Papastergiadis

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 24th 2008 Ever since September 11th not only has the perception of risk escalated but the meaning of fear has changed. At a personal level people have been speculating over their exposure to danger and institutions revising their security measures. Their capacity to cope with threats has been undermined by a loss of trust and morale. Fear has saturated every aspect of life. The American government has had to measure their ambition for global domination against the simmering prospects of revenge and sabotage occurring in their own locale. This level of anxiety is different to earlier forms of fear. It was easier to gain a sense of ironic distance from the earlier renditions of an invasion. Who can you trust? The enemy could be anyone or anywhere. The colonizer’s greatest fear is not the confrontation of the otherness in the enemy but the unexpected risks in intimacy. The intimate enemy can not only do greater harm than the visible foe but also sustain a state of perpetual anxiety that undermines any relief found in conquest. Ultimately, this state of being – when even silence is pregnant with danger, and where every stranger is also a potential enemy – is precisely the goal of the avenging colonized. Their aim is to disperse fear into the whole environment: to make anxiety ubiquitous and unlocatable. In this lecture I will examine a number of individual artistic and collective collaborative responses to the new politics of ambient fear.

Conflict within Peace, Peace within Conflict - York W. Chen

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 24th 2008 In his lecture entitled Conflicts within Peace, Peace within Conflicts, Dr. Chen will discuss the unique situation of simultaneous war and peace that seems to exist across the Taiwan Strait. It goes without saying that the cross-strait political relationship is an extremely unusual case in international politics, and although most countries don't acknowledge Taiwan's nationhood and maintain it is a part of China, Taiwan is active on the international stage as a sovereign and independent national entity.

Piracy - Tilman Baumgärtel

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 This paper looks at the phenomenon of media piracy on the internet and in real space. As I live in the Philippines, I will focus on the piracy here, but my remarks will not be limited to the local situation. I will look at the phenomenon of piracy as such and try and outline some observations about how piracy works. First of all, I will look at piracy as a means of distributing films, and - drawing on interviews with some traders of pirated media material - on how the piracy market functions in the Philippines. I will also discuss the effect that the access to quality films has on the local film culture and media literacy in general and on the teaching of film in particular. Then I will discuss the unprecedented rise of media piracy in the last couple of years as one of the most prominent issues of the "digital millennium". The "Pirates of the New World Image Order" (Patricia R. Zimmermann) are not only piggy-backing on the new globalized economy that has arisen due to the world-wide deregulation and liberalization of markets in the 1980s and 1990s. They are also profiteers of a number of technological developments in the computer sciences such as the international expansion of the Internet, which has challenged traditional notions of copy right and intellectual property on a very fundamental level.

Vacuity, topo, deception, detour, bunker - Ti-Nan Chi

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008 Subtle! Subtle! It approaches the formless. ─ Sun Tze, Art of War, 500 BC Micro-urbanism came out of a shifting paradigm of city and philosophy, which suggests there are internal realities to be investigated in order to describe how things interact and coordinate in the micro-scale realm, and which manifest the true spirit of a city and its people. Architects not only need to work within these inner systems but also to forge tactics in the micro-zones, in order to propel the self-healing potential that has been forgotten and dumped in the cultural politics of design.

Four Notions on War - Wong Hoy Cheong

2008-10-30T07:50+00:00

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008

War

2008-10-06T09:21+00:00

Dictionary of War 7th Edition, Meta-edition, Bolzano, September 20-21 2008

Setup

2008-10-06T09:21+00:00

Dictionary of War 7th Edition, Meta-edition, Bolzano, September 20-21 2008

Concept Person

2008-10-06T09:20+00:00

Dictionary of War 7th Edition, Meta-edition, Bolzano September 20-21 2008

Alphabetical Order

2008-10-04T21:57+00:00

Dictionary of War 7th Edition, Meta-edition, Bolzano September 20-21 2008

Textbook - Hyunjin Kim

2008-09-07T06:43+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Statelessness - Ursula Biemann

2008-09-07T06:42+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

State of Emergency - Jo Ractliffe

2008-09-07T06:41+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Reconquest - Patrick D. Flores

2008-09-07T06:39+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Pundit - James Merle Thomas

2008-09-07T06:38+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Pig - Jang Un Kim

2008-09-07T06:37+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Narrating a time of war - Praneet Soi

2008-09-07T06:35+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Jihad - Okwui Enwezor

2008-09-07T06:34+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Jeunesse fougue - Abdoulaye Konaté

2008-09-07T06:32+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Hysteria - Hassan Khan

2008-09-07T06:31+00:00

An associative and casual listening session to examples of shaabiyat tracks produced and distributed in Cairo over the past three years. Khan will discuss how the taboo becomes totem, the self hysterically claims a space, and aggression and paranoia become productive cultural operations, his evidence a collection of tracks that he finds to be the most interesting, surprising, and exciting cultural product to come out of his home town for a very long time. Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Hindutva and Islamism: Twins in Annihilation - Ranjit Hoskote

2008-09-07T06:29+00:00

Hindutva and Islamism are both movements of revanchism and annihilatory impact, which claim to speak in the name of a pure religious tradition that has been tainted and threatened by alien influences. In a zone of cultural confluence such as South Asia, these global movements are at war with one another: to Hindutva, secular modernity as well as Islam and Islamism are the enemy; to Islamism, secular modernity as well as Hinduism and Hindutva are the enemy. Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Full Spectrum Dominance - Kerry James Marshall

2008-09-07T06:28+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Continuity - Chung Seoyoung

2008-09-07T06:26+00:00

We could find a definition for the word "continuity" as such: "A detailed script or scenario consulted to avoid discrepancies from shot to shot in a film, allowing the various scenes to be shot out of order." While all possible kinds of "wars" are going on in the world all "possible details" disappear. But details are the bridge towards what makes life more real and interesting. By disappearance of the detail, absurdity evolves in reality and the aspire to continuity is a strong contest around this absurdity. Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Change of Game - Jarbas Lopes

2008-09-07T06:24+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Al Mukaddima: Le Bout du Monde/Anwal

2008-09-07T06:20+00:00

Dictionary of War 6th Edition Gwangju September 4-6 2008

Asymmetric Warfare

2008-08-25T07:06+00:00

[Raul Zelik], Friday, October 13th 2006, 18:00 - 18:30 At first the notion of »asymmetrical war« is a description of a more or less obvious phenomenon: since 1945 there are less and less wars between states and more and more conflicts between regular forces on the one side and irregular formations on the other side. The state-to-state war - predominant in the time after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 - was characterized by two similar kinds of army: a symmetrical disposition.

Collaboration (1)

2008-08-24T12:00+00:00

[Florian Schneider] The original idea of the DICTIONARY OF WAR traces back to an event we have been organizing almost three years ago in Tarifa, in the very south of Spain. At BORDERLINEACADEMY, where about two hundred artists, activists, theorists met, we were realizing that although we might share some basic beliefs, convictions or attitudes there is a surprising lack of understanding since specific keywords or buzzwords were conceived in tremendously different ways and notions. Sitting together and thinking about "what is to be done?" we thought that by organizing a dictionary session might reveal a certain potential for the creation of further and possibly very productive understandings and/or misunderstandings. It happened that in this spontaneous, ad-hoc or beta-version of the DICTIONARY the term "Collaboration" was the first concept. Collaboration is one of the guiding terms of an emergent political sensibility in which certain collectivities and mutalities are being redefined as modes of affectual politics. Collaboration, literally, means working together with others, especially in an intellectual endeavour.

Exergue

2008-08-24T11:52+00:00

[Irit Rogoff], Friday, June 2 16:00 - 16:15 I am here to function as the exergue, as that which comes in advance of an argument or the playing out of a hoped for argument. The exergue is a citation, a found object or quote which alerts us to both what might be coming but also establishes its relation to previous thought. In part the exergue establishes a heightened atmosphere of what is to be expected, a frisson that communicates the intention and the spirit behind that intention in advance of the thing itself.

Collaboration (2)

2008-08-24T11:44+00:00

[Galit Eilat] "Collaboration" is a structure, where two or more people work together toward a shared aim―typically for an intellectual or cultural project that is creative in nature. Yet, "Collaboration" acquires a very negative meaning as referring to persons or a groups which help an occupier or enemy of their country. What are the benefits and dangers of cultural collaborative projects between Palestinians and Israelis when any kind of collaborative structure is acknowledged as collaboration with the enemy?

Relatively calm again

2008-08-24T11:33+00:00

[Mansur Jacoubi], Friday, October 13th 2006, 17:00 - 17:30 I open this evening, having just arrived from Lebanon, which had just undergone a one-month dreadful war and is now undergoing a difficult post-war situation, or rather one might say a period of "being in-between wars." Since my task here is one of introduction, I will use this opportunity to give a brief and perhaps scattered narration of this war as a witness. To witness war is to feel the inexplicable sound of bombs, to fear death, to be in solidarity with others. To feel hate, anger, and negotiate violence. It is also to witness it in ways not unlike others: through TV and computer screens, reminding us of that saying, "wars now happen only on TV".

Thanato politics

2008-08-24T11:26+00:00

[Eyal Weizman], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 14:00 - 14:30 »Initially the task of that talk is to frame the relationship between the previous event and this one and to see how concepts could be developed. However, the kind of events and situations that we are experiencing and consuming right now would obviously make it little bit more specific. But, I think, in general that the war that is happing right now in Gaza and Lebanon is exactly a moment where events such as the Dictionary of War are made relevant..«

War, Nuclear - Darius James & Quio

2008-08-24T11:25+00:00

... somehow a remake of Sun Ra's Nuclear War from 1982

Entertainment

2008-08-23T14:16+00:00

[Emil Hrvatin], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 20:30 - 21:00 and to present various approaches to entertainment in different armies today as well as to question why don't we have entertainment for peacekeeping soldiers on international level. Lecture will consist on presenting documents as well as a part of documentary about American Military Theatre festival I am busy with.

Attitudes

2008-08-23T14:15+00:00

[Egdar Schmitz], Friday, October 13th 2006, 18:30 - 19:00

Arms Race, Architectural

2008-08-23T14:13+00:00

[Ines Weizman], Friday, June 2 16:30 - 16:55 An architectural arms race is a competition between two or more countries for supremacy through the means of architecture and urbanism. Each party competes to produce architectural imagery or concrete built form to achieve a relative gain over the other. Such gain could be accounted for either symbolically, or physically interfering with urban practices in the country of the opponent.

Anxiety

2008-08-23T14:13+00:00

[Felix Ensslin], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 18:00 - 18:30 Anxiety is the only affect that is beyond all doubt, it nevers deceives. This is Jacques Lacan’s elaboration on the subject in his Seminar titled “Anxiety”. In contradisticintion for example to both Freud and Heidegger, he thus complicates the distinction between Fear and Anxiety. For both, the psychoanalyst and the existential-ontological philosopher, the two are seperated by the plus and minus of the presence or absence of an object. For Lacan, anxiety “n’est pas sans objet - is not without an object....

Ausnahme

2008-08-23T14:12+00:00

[Michael Hirsch], Friday, October 13th 2006, 19:30 - 20:00 »Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.« This is Carl Schmitt’s famous definition of the problem of sovereign state power. It is the definition of the threat of sovereign state power in two meanings of the word: the »normal situation« is threatened by chaotic, an-archic troubles; and it is threatened by a sovereign state who re-establishes the normal order by stepping outside of the rule of law. (..:) Giorgio Agamben has, with regard to the imperialistic world politics of the USA (and with regard to Italy under Berlusconi) strengthened Schmitt’s thesis and has formulated with Walter Benjamin: »The state of exception we are living in is the rule.«

Ashwatthama

2008-08-23T14:11+00:00

[Raqs Media Collective], Friday, October 13th 2006, 17:30 - 18:00 Ashwatthama is a character in the Mahabharata, cursed to live forever, as a kind of wandering warrior.

Anti-War

2008-08-23T14:10+00:00

[Saskia Sassen], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 17:30 - 18:00 Anti War I think doesn't work anymore as a word. And I want to explore why. Is it that war itself is a situated historical something and we've moved beyond that historical period? Is it that we are no longer positioned in a clear way, so that we can identify war? - I think the last time anti-war worked, as a word, as an image, of letters, was when massive demonstrations happened all over the world, hoping to prevent the invasion of Iraq. When the invasion happened, the word didn't work anymore. Anti-War became an anti-word. Can we say anti-massacre? We don't say that we are anti-massacre. We don't say that we are again anti-bombing of sitting ducks, those who cannot bring your planes down when you bomb them with planes. Is it that war itself is really no longer what it used to be ? It's not that I like war or that I'm saying 'Oh I wish for the good old days, when war was clearly war'. But I think it is an invitation to rethink the politics of how we handle this, how we respond. War has a certain architecture, a tight architecture. It's a big word with a tight architecture. What is happening today just doesn't look like that. So what I want to sort of examine is, what is it, that might be changing? And the first thought - and again, I'm not trying to romanticize the past at all - the first thought is that, it seems that, they - I'm talking about a generic they - they only go to war when they have absolute military superiority. If it's going to be a level engagement, they are out of there. When they finally had tools, whoever - the terrorists, the murderers, the good people - whoever they were, who brought down five of those american helicopters, when they thought, that they had the skies to themselves, that was a crises back in Washington. So can we still say war when you have absolute military superiority and you're just dropping the bombs, etc. and nobody is going to bring you down, and then when they somehow bring down five of your planes, when you have been using hundreds, it's a crises. What is it that we are really talking about in the contemporary period when we speak of war? ...

Kriegsmaschine / War Machine

2008-08-23T14:09+00:00

[Nicolas Siepen], Friday, June 2 19:30 - 20:00 A montage of two kinds of montage, two types of assembling images about, in between, beyond, as a war machine within the images themselves. A fine line between love and hate: 1. Jean Genets »Un chant d’amour« (A love Song) – how to make love through a wall and que(e)r it (smoke). 2. The Godard/Gorin/Mieville machine »Ici et Ailleure« (Here and elsewhere) – how to use a two-image-assembly to ruin the War Machine as montage itself - are we not mature to read an Image yet? (Fascism)... in-between: GODARD - embedded War Machine ...

Home front

2008-08-23T14:08+00:00

[Michalis Pichler], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 15:00 - 15:30 God Bless America EXTRA CHEESE / SAUSAGE / MUSHROOM / PEPPERONI / CB/HAM / BLACK OLIVES / BEEF / ONIONS / SPECIAL / CUSTOMER

Alert

2008-08-23T11:47+00:00

[Meir Wigoder & Irit Rogoff], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 17:00 - 17:30 An occupation, military or civilian, is lived out at many different levels, modalities and distances. The suffering that is visited upon those whose freedoms are curtailed, whose movement is blocked and whose lives are threatened is rarely matched by the misgivings of those implicated in inflicting the occupation, or those associated with it through citizenship or other modes of inscription. Our concern here is with the question of how the occupiers might vigilantly live out an occupation beyond the simple rhetorics of resistance. There are many levels to such a living – out ; the need to be alert and vigilant in seeing what is actually going on, the need to document it, the need to find ways of incorporating what one sees into one’s work – often in oblique and indirect modes.

Flexibility

2008-08-23T11:35+00:00

[Eyal Weizman], Friday, June 2 19:00 - 19:30

Bang! Bang!

2008-08-23T11:34+00:00

[Albert Heta] Kosovar Pavilion Venice Biennial 2005, did not confuse only those who cannot distinguish what is an Albanian and what is a Kosovar pavilion, artist or identity but seemingly also players of the great structure of the ancient contemporary art power elite that eventually accepted apologies by the used instrument of this work (e-flux) for challenging their Biennale with a tool of their own system and continued to live on in harmony as nothing had happened in the West (Sunday, color video, 3.01 min.). These works stand and mark a time and a context that is full of Bang! Bang! (Bang! Bang!, color video, 2.20 min.).

Aufräumen

2008-08-23T11:34+00:00

[Diedrich Diederichsen], Friday, October 13th 2006, 19:00 - 19:30 (1) the image of people cleaning up their houses and streets, and what's left of it after they been attacked, bombed etc. (2) the myth of Trümmerfrauen cleaning up the rubble in post-war Germany, when, at the same time, the trope auf cleaning up was strong as a right wing trope of law and order, and even war (3) the antagonism of negentropic cleaning up and entropic war

Without Title

2008-01-31T12:56+00:00

[Muha Blackstazy] For more than 10 years, Muha writes lyrics that are very much connected with everyday life of the Roma community in Novi Sad, and turns them into hip-hop songs. In 2007 he made his first professional studio recordings; the album “Crni smo mi” (“We are Black”) was released in July and promoted at the EXIT Festival (MTV Movement campaign).

Kljuc

2008-01-31T12:38+00:00

[Teofil Pancic] A novel... The last night I slept at home was the night of December 29th, 1991. After that night I have been going to bed and been waking up in many other places, of which at least one I could , with a lifelong engrafted caution, even call my home, but no, never again after that night have I slept at home, I was never at home at all, nor I will ever be at home again, even if I would go back to that place, the place where the home was. The place, actually, still exists: it was not blown up by a grenade, bomb, dinamite or any kind of explosives, God forbid, we are all civilized people, that house, building actually, still lastingly exists in the world, there it is exactly where it has always been, now on the non-existing address...

Kosovo and corruption

2008-01-31T12:25+00:00

[Verica Barac] How did these two subjects come together, when it was perfectly clear that we have learned this lesson seven years ago - existential problems of the citizens and their families cannot be resolved by resorting to nationalism? The fact that proves that we knew this back then are the citizens who voted for democratic options in 2000 and left nationalist parties without support. Advocating for democratic changes and democratic options secured these parties a 2/3 majority in the parliament - citizens made it possible for the government to start radical changes of the society, without a serious threat of the old regime, and above all to reject the old ways of governance. The government had to change in order to be able to change the others. It couldn't transfer to the others what it did not have in the beginning. Above all, goverment couldn't fight corruption if corruption was in the foundation of its governance, and because of that the most prominent slogans of that time were about the transparency of the government, i.e., the way of governance that allowed citizens to control and waive corruption.

Thorn

2008-01-31T12:06+00:00

[Bojan Djordjev] Inscenation of the novel by Ivana Sajko "Rio Bar", which is an intimate history of the war in Croatia narrated in eight monologs of a certain girl in a wedding dress. In this quoted excerpt, described metamorphosis into a "women-thorn" represents basis of the concept THORN – practical human nature.

Vae Victis

2008-01-31T11:47+00:00

[Slavko Bogdanovic] Prologue: you are in darkness of a public room in novi sad, serbia. it is the beginning of what is called new millennium. IMAGINE a time line emerging marking origin and development of the law concepts of war, determining destiny of individuals, nowadays we call them civilians. IMAGINE you are looking into the maelstrom of humanity & civilization, detected by a plummet hanged on your mental thread, rolling off down into the depth of times immemorial, two key words you are looking for in the past: war & civilians [12 letters only]. IMAGINE you are in rome It is the year 390 BC, the future eternal city is conquered by the gallic victor brennus romans must deliver gold as set in terms of peace arrangement, they complain that gauls use excessive weights in measuring gold, then brennus added his sword among weights, exclaiming: VAE VICTIS.

NSK Garda

2008-01-31T11:21+00:00

[Irwin] NSK Garda refers to the project in which the slovenian art group Irwin collaborates with various European armies. In these actions soldiers, with Malevich's cross on their sleeves, raise and guard the flag of the NSK State in Time. In that sense it is not really a performance but more some sort of tableau vivant of the real army wearing a Malevich cross. Art society and army society are social structures that are usually totally opposite to each other and very rarely mix. With this action Irwin is organizing this encounter. As an art state NSK is in fact in parasitic relation with other, normal states and in this project this is made visible. Dusan Mandic, member of IRWIN, intoduces the recent performance in Kosovo.

Wall

2008-01-31T02:50+00:00

[Metahaven] The wall that separates 'us' from 'them', friend from enemy, organizes the opposition of imaginations. A conflict (or war) of projections, virtual placeholders, where the enemy is designed as an image that will never actualize. But the consequences of the wall are real; information which would allow us to find out whether our outrageous ideas about others hold any truth, is being managed and reduced to the level of images in emerging ‘zero friction zones’; public space, in every aspect, is being reshaped under the imagined threat from the opposite side of the wall. This lecture will describe the wall as an imaginary piece of architecture and rhetorical device from which it is possible to observe conflicts carried out through images. Those conflicts include well-known rhetorical oppositions like Team B versus the 'Soviet threat', the Neocons versus the Axis of Evil, and European 'Leitkultur' versus radical Islam. This talk will address how many simultaneous oppositions are sustained by the wall and how ultimately the wall even separates 'us' from 'us'.

Torture, terror, tranquility

2008-01-31T01:59+00:00

[Martha Rosler] Martha Rosler reads from her essay accompanying the re-emergence unchanged of her 1983 videotape A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night, accompanied by a screen saver of images on her computer.

Thanksgiving

2008-01-31T01:23+00:00

[Vesna Kesic] In early 1991, when Croatia received the first international recognitions of its statehood, the euphoria was enormous. Such were the paradoxes of the situation. While the third of the country was yet to feel the war casualties, the state television launched a trashy song "Danke Deutschland" as a mark of gratitude to the first state that gave the recognition. The author researches how the phrase Danke Deutschland changed its meaning through the time, what does it mean today in different sets of memory. The concept consists of a video clip and narration.

Terrorism

2008-01-31T01:03+00:00

[Volker Eick] The term ›terrorism‹ comes from the Latin word terrere, ›to frighten‹ via the French word terrorisme. The first use of the word ›terrorism‹ referred to state rule by terror. It was coined in the years after the French Revolution – the so-called Reign of Terror – and identified terror as an instrument of state power. Therefore, ›terrorism‹ became popular between 1793 and 1795 during the regime de la terreur. It was the French Revolution leader Robespierre who – just shortly before he himself was killed by his ›Madame Guillotine‹ – proclaimed in 1794: »Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.« ›Terrorism‹ thus refers to state action. In the interim, with the generalization of the bourgeois national state since the eighteenth century, the power of states and of ruling class ideologies have successfully deflected and redefined terrorism as first and foremost an instrument of anti-state power. Generally speaking, the term is meant to de-legitimize any kind of resistance. A 1988 study by the US Army found 109 definitions of ›terrorism‹ that covered a total of 22 different definitional elements. As the only general characteristic generally agreed upon is that ›terrorism‹ involves violence and the threat of violence, many scholars avoid using this term – except those who are interested in using it for political, ideological and economic reasons. Among these more than hundred definitions, not all recognize the possibility of the legitimate use of violence by civilians against an invader in an occupied country or against ›their‹ government, and would thus label all resistance movements as ›terrorist‹ groups. Ultimately, the distinction is a political judgment. The paper will guide us through its controversial meanings.

Retro-Massmedia Shockwaves & Human Membranes

2008-01-31T00:42+00:00

[Hans Bernhard] Embeded Journalism vs. Self-organized Multitude of Observation. The current conflict situation in Kenya reflects once again a critical point in our retro-mass media society. The information from inside the country is not valid, the information going to the "world" is twisted to perversion through embedded journalism, dubious sources and combustion point monitoring. The conflict existed before and will exist after the mass media storm, the bloodshet happens within very limited boundaries is mapped on top of the country as a whole - and then broadcast to the world under the assumption of mass media without information. This problem is contraindicated and reflected through the project SLUM-TV - a counter-headlining empowerment of cultural selforganization. SLUM-TV documents the lives of the people in Mathare (500.000 people slum in Nairobi) and reevaluates these lives and their surroundings through the eye of the camera. The local partners film and document their own existence and the social, political and military aspects of living inside such a melting pot. The small movies (newsreels) are put together and broadcast in public places exclusively inside Mathare, reaching the local audience through a variety of self-established cinemas (pirate cinemas reaching very large audiences). Published online, the newsreels plus written reports reach the global audience. The presentation will briefly introduce SLUM-TV and will document the current situation in Kenya (Mathare-Slum) via the performance of texts written and blogged by local SLUM-TV members.

Renaming machine

2008-01-31T00:25+00:00

[Suzana Milevska] Renaming Machine is a war concept that could be interpreted as a subtle but powerful strategy for erasing ethnic, cultural or gender identity without using any aggression or causing any direct material damage. It functions as a conceptual weapon of destruction, as a kind of wage war or a contest between the old and new identity layer. However, renaming simultaneously adds and multiplies a new layer of identity each time it erases one, because the names could be neither stolen nor completely erased: the best example of accumulation by dispossession in David Harvey’s terms. Moreover, according to Jacques Derrida giving names is also an act of love. RM attempts to point to the arbitrariness and contingency of representation that accompany the use of names and to raise the discussion about the invisible ideological patterns of “desiring renaming machine” standing behind the power regimes of representation while dispossessing and giving names. In my presentation I want to focus on the exploration of this clandestine ambivalence within the renaming as a juxtaposition of various identities. It is extremely important to reflect the complex entanglements of the political and cultural processes of renaming and the urgent need for questioning how these processes and patterns influenced the construction and destabilisation of national, cultural and personal identity during the last two decades within the Balkan region. I aim to encompass various art and cultural phenomena attached to renaming in order to explore the scale to which renaming affects visual culture and transgresses cultural identities and subjectivities in the Balkans. Renaming Machine was specifically motivated by the unique and absurd outwitting between Greece and Macedonia about the right to use the name “Macedonia.” This conflict resulted with exhausting processes of negotiations that still trouble the stability of the region. Regardless all paradoxes this “war of names” became an international precedent and the best example that names are overrated as identity insignia and “omen.”

Reconstruction

2008-01-30T23:47+00:00

[Andrea Kuluncic] Reconstruction will consist of screening of two videos: “A Reconstruction of an Unimportant Day in Our History” and “A Reconstruction of an Important Day in Our History”, by the artist. First video shows a day in a life of Josip Broz Tito during his stay in country side, in the castle. Castle is also known under the name of „Tito's Castle“. Tito as passionate hunter, often stayed in the Castle hunting wild animals, alone, with his wife Jovanka (who was as well passionate hunter) or with eminent foreign statesmen. Second video reconstructs the meeting of the two presidents: Croatian, Franjo Tuđman and Serbian, Slobodan Milošević. The meeting was held on April 15th, 1991 in Tikveš Castle. First armed conflicts broke out in the region of Slavonia in the beginning of May, 15 to 20 days after that meeting. War reached Tikveš in the beginning of June. For a period of time Castle was used as a headquarters of Arkan's paramilitary group.

Performing Posses

2008-01-30T23:22+00:00

[Gini Mueller] Politics, Activism and not at least performative potentials meet in the term “Posse“ as conflictive spaces of emancipatory wars against border- and bio-regimes. In their well known analyses of “Empire“ Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe “Posse“ from the latin term as a verb of power, an activity, which refers to the political power and subjectivity of the multitude: Posse is what a mind and a body can do. In a wider context the word also expresses in english the branding of a gang or clique, and in german it's also the theatre-term for a scetch or form of comedy. In the spectacular fields of staged WTO/WEF/G8 Summits, many protest forms of Activism develop techniques of resistance, using Media, Theatre, and Art-tools, and lots of performative and subversive “Posse-Actors“ can be found in the last years: like the Rebel Clown Army, PublixTheatreCaravan, Tutte Bianche, Pink Block, noborder-Activism etc. Their methods of acting provoced in special moments of summit-spectacles the governmental techniques of repressive (police-)representations. Performing Posses refer in this sense more to Slogans like „Another war is possible!“ (noborderlab2003). Their forms of „wargames“ link struggles of social movements with a post-Brechtian and “minor“-acting gestures together.

National Mythomania

2008-01-30T22:32+00:00

[Zelimir Zilnik] Screening of the inserts from Žilnik's movies: OLD TIMER (1988), TITO'S SECOND TIME AMONG THE SERBS (1994), EUROPE NEXT DOOR (2005) and WILD CAPITALISM (2008). Inserts are illustrating thesis how former Yugoslav political elite since the middle of the 1980s, after longterm conflict around Tito's inheritor and heritage, dismissed internationalism and self-management as axioms of the state's foundaments. Engineering of tribalizing of people was put in motion, together with ideology of nationalistic mythomanie and re-sentiments. In difference to the other former socialistic states, this enabled ten more years of plunder of the common goods, to the feudalized and comminuted governing elites of Yugoslavia. Newly produced class posses goods, but it ruined the state and economy, and the people are getting poor, unemployed, sick or leaving the country. New capitalists trends, especially through the example of Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro, are bringing over again the spirit of fatalism to the Balkan, which reminds us to the last decades of reign of Ottoman Empire. Political and cultural discourse in Serbia is drowned in the Kosovo myth. It is substitution for both past and the future, including the real state. Does in 2008 political class teleports Serbia to year 1808?

Na tragu mitologije

2008-01-30T22:04+00:00

[Jovan Divjak] Remotely contributed concept by Jovan Divjak, former general in the Bosnian army during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. He was the highest ranking ethnic Serb in the army and one of its most educated and experienced officers. On April 8th, 1992, Divjak became Deputy Commander of BiH's Territorial Defense forces and a month later oversaw the defence of Sarajevo from a major JNA attack. In the video, he first explains that the reason why he can not be physically present at the DICTIONARY OF WAR is that government of Republika Srpska (Serbian territory in Bosnia) finds him, among ten other people, responsible for the events on May the 3rd 1992 in Sarajevo. He is found responsible by the government of Republika Srpska for deaths of the soldiers when the units of Territorial Defense of city of Sarajevo attacked one unit of JNA-Yugoslav army. Jovan Divjak talks about constant mythologization as a tool for hegemony of one nationality over the others, which according to him, could lead and led to a bloodshed. As Serb, he is strongly criticizing Serbian nationalism and hegemony in Bosnia, as well as Croatian and Bosnian attempts towards mythologization.

Ghetto Ambient

2008-01-30T21:18+00:00

[Sebastian Meissner] Ghetto Ambient explores urban and rural environments frequently described as “non-places”. Expanding common definitions, which regards such places with limited presence of identity, social relations and history, this project is focusing on "places at the edge of the globalized world" (Spex), where silent and barely visible wars are fought: struggle for economical domination in the Barents (RUS/NO/FIN), new representations of (virtual) Jewishness in Crakovian district of Kazimierz (PL), housing struggle on the outskirts of Algiers (AL), abandoned agricultural and touristic resorts in the Judea desert (IL) and many other places. Meissner uses processed photographic material collected on various geographic locations dissecting it into fragments and re-arranging it to a highly dramatic fictional movie. Moving slowly from one geographic location to another, each sequence is build with “an acute sense of spatial composition and narrative structure which is drawing the listener into a captivating aural tale” (All Music).

Eating Rawness

2008-01-30T20:10+00:00

[Jean Mathee] “Man tries to satisfy his need for aggresion at the expense of his neighbour, to exploit his work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to appropriate his goods, to humiliate him, to inflict suffering on him, to torture and kill him”. (Feud); To find the path of desire is to encounter on routethe bad character of the drives, settled at the heart of all subjects who have to recognise it. Who am I? “You are the waste that fails in the world through the devil's anus.” (Martin Luther); Radical forms of sublimation are attempts to confront and transform the bad character of the drives, salvation holds on by a thread.

Digital Despair

2008-01-30T19:40+00:00

[Geert Lovink] The war in Iraq, from 2003 to the present, is the first war covered by bloggers. Salam Pax caused a stir by reporting online the last months of the Sadam Hussein regime and the US invasion. During the short summer of media freedom (2003-2004) Iraqi weblogs popped up in great numbers. Four years later we find ourselves in midst of a pool of 'digital despair'. Most bloggers have left the country and report from Damascus, Amman or London. Humor and irony have vanished. Some became news professionals, others turned silent. How are modern communication technologies such a blogs used to express emotions about the loss and exile? The tragic condition of the Iraqi blogosphere is used as a case study to investigate blogs as online diaries. Rather than promoting 'citizen journalism', I analyse blogs as 'technologies of the self' (Foucault).

Counter imaging

2008-01-30T19:17+00:00

[Erden Kosova] After a period of relative normalisation, the politics within the Republic of Turkey has been drifted again into serious conflict. The rise of the governing party, which has its roots from the Islamic movement and which tries now to fuse cultural conservatism with rampant neo-liberalism, has disconcerted the established actors of the regime (army, bureaucracy and the urban bourgeoise) and the urban middle class in the West of the country which feels threatened by the heedless nouveau riche emerging from the conservative provinces. The looming threat of having another military coup was evaded by the landslide election victory of the governing party. The nationalist discourse recovered from the bitter defeat when the Kurdish separatist army decided to resume armed struggle and inflicted serious casualties to the Turkish army. Along the rise of the political tension, the contemporary art scene in Istanbul has experienced a considerable institutionalisation reinforced by the sudden interest of the most prominent bourgeois families and financial corporates into the field. The art practice which has defined itself trough anti-statist, anti-militarist and anti-nationalist stance encountered a bitter dilemma. A strand within these artists surrendered to the recuperative frameworks of the new institutions whereas another strand tried to radicalise it political edge, to the extent of deciding to switch occasionally into anonymous visual production.

Collection

2008-01-30T18:54+00:00

[Nebojsa Milikic] The guided tour through an art-collection assembled in the period between 1986/7-1996/7, which is the period of the outset and ongoing of wars in Yugoslavia. How social and political agendas were absorbed or radiated through the process of selection - as seen in the content and concept of works. Which ideological and class positioning of the collectioner could generate motives, guide decisions or get blended into todays appearance of the collection.

Civil war (A quiet)

2008-01-30T18:16+00:00

[Thomas Campbell] Over the last fifteen years, many parts of the former Soviet Union have been devastated by civil war and other disruptive armed conflicts. Despite this glaring fact, it has often been stated that the break-up of the Soviet Union was a remarkably "bloodless" affair. In a major Russian city like Saint Petersburg, which has seemingly been far from the frontlines in any of these wars, the economic stagnation and chaotic political scene of the eighties and nineties have given way to what the city's current governor calls "aggressive development" and to an apparently well-fed political apathy amongst the previously engaged populace. Here, then, we see the exact opposite of anything resembling civil war -- a stable (albeit dull) civil peace. But what if this peace is, in fact, founded on a "quiet" civil war that has been going on for the past decade -- a war that in many ways has been just as devastating for the "losing" party as the hot civil wars fought in the former Soviet hinterlands? How can we delineate the frontline in this quiet civil war? How do we identify its victims? Its victors? How is it connected to the "real" wars in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia? And what does it have to do with an American band called Beirut and an unhappy Russian girl named Masha?

Untermensch im Osten

2007-02-28T09:20+00:00

[Peter Jahn], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 21:30 - 22:00 Der Krieg im Osten 1941-1945, der mehr als 30 Millionen Menschen das Leben kostete, sprengte alle Grenzen zwischen „erlaubtem“ Töten feindlicher Soldaten im Kampf und dem Mord an Gefangenen und Zivilisten. „Zig Millionen“ zivile Opfer sah schon die deutsche Planung vor, die folgende Kriegsrealität war der Planung adäquat. Unter den Faktoren, die einen derart enthemmten Krieg möglich machten, wird hier das deutsche Feindbild des slawischen Untermenschen thematisiert: Inhalt, Kontext, Funktion, Tradition.

Stance

2007-02-28T09:19+00:00

[Khalo Matabane], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 21:00 - 21:30
.... to talk about a filmmaker taking a stance

Safe Distance

2007-02-28T09:18+00:00

[kuda.org], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 20:30 - 21:00 Safe Distance is video that was recorded during NATO air strikes against FR Yugoslavia. Videotape shows electronic cockpit of the US Air Force plane. There were 4 airplanes flying from NATO-base from Italy to destination in Yugoslavia. Mission objective was to bomb several targets in the area around city of Novi Sad. On the way back, after mission was completed, plane was shot. Tape (Sony Video 8) was found near crashed plane in Fruska Gora mountain in Srem region. It shows electronic cockpit with basic graphical interface and voice communication between pilots. Videotape is a regular document of flight used by command structures to analyze its efficiency and success after very mission. Tape presents these last moments before plain was crashed.

Resist, Refuse, Rebel

2007-02-28T09:15+00:00

[Rimini Protokoll], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 20:00 - 20:30 The two Vietnam Veterans and Anti-War activists Darnell Stephen Summers and Dave Blalock with their definition of Resist...Refuse...Rebell

Raw

2007-02-28T09:14+00:00

[Arianna Bove], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 19:30 - 20:00 From the Practice of Joy before Death (in Visions of Excess)
 Heraclitean Meditation : “I myself am war”
 “I imagine human movement and excitation, whose possibilities are limitless: this movement and excitation can only be appeased by war. I imagine the gift of an infinite suffering, of blood and open bodies, in the image of an ejaculation cutting down the one it jolts and abandoning him to an exhaustion charged with nausea. I imagine the earth projected in space, like a woman screaming, her head in flames. Before the terrestrial world whose summer and winter order the agony of all living things, before the universe composed of innumerable turning stars, limitlessly losing and consuming themselves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendours whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere ceaselessly give itself and be annihilated. I imagine myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in agreement with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of TIME, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed. There are explosives everywhere that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when I think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them.”

Profit

2007-02-28T09:12+00:00

[Stefan Heidenreich ], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 18:30 - 19:00 Eine kurze Ökonomie des Kriegs als Dienstleistung: Was wird beim Krieg verdient. Wer bietet den Service an. Zu welchem Preis. Wer kauft. Wer zahlt. Wie sieht der Markt aus.

Portrait/Mugshot

2007-02-28T09:10+00:00

[Armin Smailovic], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 18:00 - 18:30 During my military time in former yugoslavia i had to photograph more than 4500 soldiers for their military IDs. This happened 3 years before the war, which started 91. In the age of 19 and not enough politically grown to realize what i ve got in my hands, the negatives were just trash for me, after i printed 4 copies for each soldier. So all together something like 18000 prints in B/W. Then in 91 i went to the croatian war as a war photographer. During and especially after the war i had to think about all this young boys, i was taken a photographs of. What happend to them? Are they killed? Tortured? Or became killing machines? I cant tell...i only know that these images with the green shirt, fresh cut hair and a scary expression in their face are in my mind until today. These mug shots were my biggest project concerning war i have ever done. Now with the DOW i start from the beginning. Collecting the first 100 faces of an anti-military collaboration. I changed green into white. The colour for mourning and peace in the same moment. There are hundreds of war images by photographers like James Nachtwey, Franklin Stuart, Robert Capa and many others who create images of war and gave it a „face“. I couldn't and cant use those images of thousands of „faces“ of the soldiers to do something with it. So i started from the beginning. And i have to say that... “At least, when we create images, we are doing something.”

Plündern

2007-02-28T09:09+00:00

[Vanessa Joan Müller], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 17:30 - 18:00 „Shoplifters of the world, unite and take over“, sangen die Smiths 1986. Das destabilisierende Potenzial des kollektiven Ladendiebstahls scheint ungleich geringer gegenüber dem des Plünderns, und doch setzten bereits die Smiths auf das Aushebeln jener Tauschgesetzmäßigkeit „Geld gegen Ware“, auf denen der ökonomische Imperativ des Systems Kapitalismus nun einmal basiert. Die romantische Vorstellung des kollektiven Ladendiebstahls funktioniert jedoch nur in Friedenszeiten. Im Krieg wird geplündert, und das heißt die willkürlich Aneignung von Besitz, die der Logik des entfesselten Haben-Wollens folgt.

Pleasure

2007-02-28T09:09+00:00

[Avi Mograbi], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 17:00 - 17:30 My concept consists of 2 videotaped testimonies of ex-soldiers concerning their service experiences. The first one is a short testimony about the pleasure of controlling other people with the tips of you fingers. 3 minutes. The second testimony concerns the pleasure of doing what you are trained to do and how killing can be fun.

Perception Attack

2007-02-28T09:08+00:00

[Brian Massumi], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 16:30 - 17:00

Magician

2007-02-28T09:07+00:00

[Jonathan Allen], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 16:00 - 16:30 »Once we fully recognise secular magic's role as a cultural agent, our sensitivity to the play of puzzlement, fictiveness, and contingency in modernity will be heightened.« Simon During, Modern Enchantments (Harvard 2002) »The purpose of this paper is to instruct the reader so he may learn to perform a variety of acts secretly and undetectably. In short, here are instructions for deception.« Some Operational Uses for the Art of Deception, Commissioned for MKULTRA (CIA) from magician John Mulholland in 1954.

Homeland Security Advisory System

2007-02-28T09:06+00:00

[Stephan Trüby], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 15:30 - 16:00 Since 2002, a blueprint for escape route coding has been in place in the United States: the colour-coded terror alert levels set by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), called “5 Codes”. Even though the colour sequence does not correspond with the rising wavelength of the colours in the spectrum (blue comes before green), the US government was still clever to choose the rainbow motif, as the “Rainbow Warrior” Isaac Newton with his prismatic analysis of “white divine light” made a major contribution to the dawn of the age of risk . The 5 Codes are exit and relaxation codifications in the age of an outside inside the law. Woven into them is a subtext of readiness, flight and evacuation measures. Sometimes they keep a population on their toes, sometimes not, they slow the tempo down and speed it up as well. They are invisible distribution corridors with regulators for the flow of movement, rudimentary notations of a state choreography for a country that is escaping.

Heraklit

2007-02-28T09:05+00:00

[Marcus Steinweg], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 14:30 - 15:00 Heraklit ist der Philosoph, der die Welt, d.h. die Seinstotalität, als KRIEG gedacht hat, als POLEMOS, WIDERSTREIT (eris), AUSEINANDERSETZUNG, ZWIETRACHT, WERDEN. Mit Heraklit ist der KRIEG zu einer ONTOLOGISCHEN GRÖSSE erhoben. Seitdem gibt es ONTOLOGIE nur als ONTOLOGIE DES KRIEGES und als KRIEGERISCHE ONTOLOGIE. Vielleicht ist Heraklit der PHILOSOPH, von dem sich die ABENDLÄNDISCHE PHILOSOPHIE (d.h. Die PHILOSOPHIE ÜBERHAUPT) nicht erholen kann und nie wird erholen können. Vielleicht liegt hier das ERBE der HERAKLITISCHEN KRIEGSKUNST: das DENKEN, die PHILOSOPHIE, jenseits der PAZIFIERUNG zu situieren.

Helikopter

2007-02-28T09:04+00:00

[Heinrich Dubel], Saturday, February 24th, 2007, 14:00 - 14:30 The essence or the hidden identity of the helicopter appear as a dichotomy; on the one hand a total threat coming from above, something you cannot possibly escape from, the all-seeing flying eye in the sky, the omnidirectional warmachine; and at the same time, its opposite: a rescuer coming from the air, from heaven above, as an angel. One aspect of this idea is of release (or freedom): Release from threat and fear but also freedom that can be attained if you grow above and beyond yourself. This cipher of evil and illumination is united in the image of the dragon, the snake of fire or the plumed snake. Such basic figures emerge from an meta-individual archetypal reservoir of images of the human psyche traversing the mythologies of many different peoples.

Flintenweib

2007-02-26T19:59+00:00

[Andrea Moll], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 21:00 - 21:30 »Flintenweib« ist eine auf deutscher Seite gebräuchliche feindliche Bezeichnung für die sowjetische Soldatin im Zweiten Weltkrieg, sie wurde in Propaganda und Befehlsgebung der Wehrmacht angewandt – mit mörderischer Konsequenz. Der Begriff „Flintenweib“ äußert auch eine soziale Konstruktion des Weiblichen und Männlichen im Krieg.

Disappeared

2007-02-26T19:57+00:00

[Sylvere Lotringer], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 20:00 - 20:30 People don’t just disappear in wartime, they also disappear in broad daylight. Los Desaparecidos. Not accounted for, never to be seen again. Some are lucky enough to survive, but they are not in peace for all that, they become the war. Through their reactions, they reveal a reality that may not be accessible in any other way : the war is never over. It is simply simmering under the surface, ready to burst out at the slightest opportunity and show itself for what it is. War has become one with peace as death has become one with life.

DAVOS/DUBAI

2007-02-26T19:54+00:00

[Christian von Borries], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 19:30 - 20:00 exploitation / imagineered urbanism / islamic banking / laundered dollars / permanent exception / slavery in the 21st century / The World Economic Forum Davos / "The world" island resort, Dubai

Coloniality

2007-02-26T19:53+00:00

[Soenke Zehle], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 19:00 - 19:30 Coloniality, no longer an awkward major paradigm but an agile minor concept, enters the mise en scène of William Kentridge's »black box« (Germany/South Africa 2005) and its reenactment of Germany's most recent Historikerstreit to report on various passions for the real.

Autoxylopyrocycloboros

2007-02-26T19:52+00:00

[Simon Starling], Friday, February 23th, 2007, 18:30 - 19:00 Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) took the form of self-defeating journey in a small wooden steam boat. The voyage, made on the waters of Loch Long, Scotland, home to the Trident submarine base and neighbouring peace camp, was fuelled with wood from the boat itself, as plank by plank, piece by piece, it was feed to its own boiler, until inevitably disappearing into the submarine infested depths of the Loch.

PartisanInnen, Kärntner

2006-10-18T16:18+00:00

[Tina Leisch], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 16:00 - 16:30

War on the Poor

2006-10-18T14:18+00:00

[Ultrared], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 21:00 - 21:30 What does the war on the poor sound like?

Verfassungskriege

2006-10-18T14:16+00:00

[Peter Weibel], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 20:30 - 21:00

Tracking

2006-10-18T14:15+00:00

[Jordan Crandall], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 20:00 - 20:30 ways of seeing change over time - shaped by history, thechnology, culture and are closely connected with ways of thinking... tracking as 1) a technology / 2) a perceptual modality / 3) as a discourse

Territory

2006-10-18T14:14+00:00

[Peter Fend], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 19:30 - 20:00 1. patterns of location in past wars 2. threat to territory as rationale for war 3. outer space as the upcoming field of war

Surface

2006-10-18T14:13+00:00

[Tris Vonna-Michell], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 19:00 - 19:30 a science-fiction story of berlin in 1945, about trainstations, subways and bus-lines, tunnels, places, borders and hamburger bahnhof.

Staged Revolution

2006-10-18T14:11+00:00

[Oleg Kireev], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 18:30 - 19:00

Sensibilità

2006-10-18T14:09+00:00

[Franco Berardi], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 18:00 - 18:30 Training // Rhizome // Conjunction // Elephant // What next

Revenge

2006-10-18T14:08+00:00

[Warren Neidich], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 17:30 - 18:00 "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." (Mahatma Gandhi)

Pro-vocation

2006-10-18T14:07+00:00

[Azra Aksamija], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 17:00 - 17:30 Provocation is a means of visualizing a religious identity in a secular context. As a hybrid of the notions of vocation, "a divine call to God’s service," and provocation, "a means of arousing or stirring to action", provocation can be understood a means of asserting a believer's democratic rights to practice his or her religion fearlessly.

Power Points

2006-10-18T14:06+00:00

[DeeDee Halleck], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 16:30 - 17:00 This presentation starts with a look at Crystal City, Virginia and K Street in the District of Colombia -- places in the Washington area where war is brokered and then moves to the beneficiaries of the K street deals -- places like the Blackwater Headquarters and the General Dynamics submarine company in Connecticut.

Negotiation

2006-10-18T13:54+00:00

[Sergej Goran Pristaš & Ivana Ivkovic], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 15:30 - 16:00 In a format of an (in)operative interview we will try to negotiate in a polarized field between Jan-Luc Godard's movie "Here or Elsewhere" and Ivana Sajko's play "Ribcage" which we once used to root our thematizations of war. Silence and waiting and questions and oblivion are the keywords of our small performance machine.

Kriegsgefangenenlager

2006-10-18T13:53+00:00

[Andreas Hiepko], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 15:00 - 15:30

Komplizenschaft

2006-10-18T13:51+00:00

[Gesa Ziemer], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 14:30 - 15:00 Komplizenschaft wird als kühles Plädoyer für einen kritischen Lebensentwurf, der sich als Alltagspraxis versteht und weniger das Feld der Kunst tangiert, vorgeschlagen. Komplizenschaft steht für eine mikrogemeinschaftliches Arbeits- und Lebensform und ist ein Beispiel für die Kraft des Schwachen. Anhand von 18 Regeln begründe ich, dass Komplizen nicht nur Mitdenker, sondern vor allem Mittäter sind. Komplizen sind keine Strategen, sondern Taktiker, die es vermögen mit den Ereignissen zu spielen und günstige Gelegenheiten zu ergreifen. Eng miteinander verflochten schreiten sie zur Tat. Sei diese Tat legal oder illegal – genau diese Doppelstruktur macht ihre Faszination und Schlagkraft aus. Weil sie eigene Gesetze kreieren, die sie mehr binden als das geltende Recht, lancieren sie alternative Ordnungen, die Machtstrukturen transparent machen und temporär verändern.

Hostis Humani Generis

2006-10-18T13:50+00:00

[Lawrence Liang], Saturday, October 14th 2006, 14:00 - 14:30 Abstract wars demand abstract enemies, and the Hostis Humani Generis (or the enemy against all mankind) is a title that has been bestowed on a host of figures; starting with the pirate and now the terrorist, I seek to understand the links between property, piracy and terrorism and propose that the concept of Hostis Humani Generis helps us understand the idea of war as a continuation of property by other means.

Heroes

2006-10-14T23:48+00:00

[Thomas Draschan], Friday, October 13th 2006, 21:30 - 22:00

Electronic Soldier

2006-10-14T23:42+00:00

[Stefan Kaufmann], Friday, October 13th 2006, 21:00 - 21:30 Der neue Soldat – meist als electronic soldier bezeichnet – trägt die Insignien des Informationszeitalters: in seinem Rucksack befindet sich ein wearable computer; sein Helm ist mit einem heads-up display, integriertem Ohrhörer und Mikrophon bestückt; Funkgerät und Antenne schließen ihn permanent an ein ge-fechtsfeldumfassendes W-LAN an; die Waffe lässt sich mit zahlreichen optotroni-schen Komponenten, wie Nachtsichtgerät und Videokamera, ausrüsten; GPS und andere features ergänzen die Rüstung. Und in der Tat lässt sich der electronic soldier als eine Figur an der Front der Informationsgesellschaft begreifen.

Déracinement

2006-10-14T23:39+00:00

[Christine Frisinghelli], Friday, October 13th 2006, 20:30 - 21:00 Der Begriff der "Entwurzelung" orientiert sich an dem von Pierre Bourdieu gewählten Begriff "Déracinement / Uprooting", der gleichzeitig den Titel eines von ihm in Zusammenarbeit mit Abdelmalek Sayad 1964 veröffentlichten Buches bildet. Gegenstand dieser Studie sind die tiefgreifenden gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der französischen Kolonialpolitik (seit 1830) und des Unabhängigkeitskrieges (1954-1962) auf die algerische Bevölkerung. Vor allem die Umsiedlung großer Bevölkerungsgruppen insbesondere im ländlichen Raum in die Centres de regroupement, von der über 2 Millionen Algerier (ein Viertel der Gesamtbevölkerung) betroffen waren, ist eine der brutalsten Vorgänge dieser Art der Geschichte und wurde von Bourdieu/Sayad in ihrer Studie exemplarisch analysiert.

Conditional Surrender to the City of Gardens

2006-10-14T23:35+00:00

[The Errorists], Friday, October 13th 2006, 20:00 - 20:30 An experiment in teleology via a syntax octopus of popsongs. DNA is a syntax, which names an ideal fruiting endstate: a productive human, a reproductive frog, etc. This name for the future-state elaborates in response to experience-towards structural realization at full-resolution/reality. Human Rights and DNA are names for that set of infrastructure economies-the organs comprising a body- that allow the individual cells to experience at the next absolute scale of economy. This in contrast to the thoroughly discredited micro-incrementalist reactionary future-gaming of war and market masters. Oh the poor old market, the poor old web- precious self-elaborating logics- in desperate need of colleague economies. In need of the Multiple Transnational Infrastructure Economies which will use the extracted refined and recombined modernist materialism to form the infrastructure trellis that can support the elaboration outwards, of the next absolute scale of economy: The World Organ Economies, The Global City of the Gardens.

World War

2006-07-25T11:35+00:00

[Klaus Viehmann], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 19:00 - 19:30 Everyone knows that World War II was a global war. However, knowledge of its development and impact on Western Europe is rather limited. At least in the last two centuries knowledge of war crimes has increased. The purpose of today’s lecture is to draw a rough outline of the neglected aspects of this war and to raise some interest in the exploits and suffering of the people who were affected by fascism, “Herrenmenschentum” and aggression, and fought against it. The lecture is hold in german, below you could read the english translation.

United Nations

2006-07-25T11:33+00:00

[Ariane Müller], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 18:30 - 19:00 Rio, Peking, Kairo, Istanbul, Genf, Kyoto, Habitat, Houairou, Konventionen, Protokolle, Deklarationen. Ariane Müller transfers excessive demands, over fatigue and prescribed terminology in a repetitive rhythm of the german language. We're still working on an appropriate translation.

Translation

2006-07-25T11:32+00:00

[Tom Keenan], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 17:00 - 18:30 What sort of language is war, if it is one? What would "total" conflict be? When does escalation become impossible? When the violence is not exercised to force others into a conversation, or to change the terms of a debate, but in order to end a debate, to remove the other party in a debate once and for all, when debate itself -- or politics, or language -- is itself the target of the violence .... is that the limit? Is that the moment when things actually can't get any worse?

Transition

2006-07-25T11:27+00:00

[Erzen Shkololli], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 16:30 - 17:00 Presentation of a works will reflect the dramatic transformation of the region, connected in particular with decay of the local totalitarian regimes during the 1990's. By representing various forms of ethnic, religious or political predestination and manipulation symbolizing the contrast social situation in his homeland.

Theatres of Possession Operation Systems

2006-07-25T11:23+00:00

[Konrad Becker], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 16:00 - 16:30 In times of global wars, financial wars, the classic battlefield, the »Theatre of Operation« is not longer visible. Konrad Becker focuses on perception and the human nervous system and instead of defining and giving answers he poses questions: 100 questions for the Dictionary of war.

Resistance

2006-07-25T11:22+00:00

[Ingrid Strobl], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 15:30 - 16:00 Relativizing the Absolute "Resistance" is among those terms that although seemingly clear-cut, are in reality difficult to define. What is resistance? Who defines what it is? What conditions have to be met so that who identifies or recognizes what to be resistance? And which and whose interests stand behind the label?

Redundancy

2006-07-25T11:20+00:00

[Marko Peljhan], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 15:00 - 15:30 »Redundancy« is a crucial element for building network systems - so failure does not mean the end of the system; it's about functioning beyond the failure. But the artist Marko Peljhan is not only interested in the technical terms of the concept but also in its political meaning and impact.

Prisoner of War

2006-07-25T11:00+00:00

[Naeem Mohaiemen], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 14:30 - 15:00 It is almost banal to start by talking about the ongoing Iraq apocalypse. After thousands of lives, and many multiples more of ink and video have been spilt, what more remains to be said about this manifestation of permanent war? Those who marched in anti-war rallies can now feel some schadenfreude at the unraveling of the entire project for a New Century. But at what a terrible price we earned the right to say "we told you so". Even after all the interventionist fantasies have shattered, there is no post-war peace dividend. The madness of the Neocon project only replaced by the equally insane Islamist project of the Mahdi Army, and the ethnic cleansing and forced partition dreams of the Shiite and Sunni death squads.

Pop

2006-07-25T10:57+00:00

[Georg Seeßlen & Markus Metz], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 14:00 - 14:30 There is no war without pop, and there is no pop without war. Georg Seeßlen and Markus Metz perform their lecture in german, commenting and analyzing multiple film extracts. In the »preface« below you'll find their crucial questions and thesis written in english.

Police War

2006-07-25T10:56+00:00

[Katja Diefenbach], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 13:30 - 14:00 We are currently entering a hegemonic war regime dominated by strategies of preventive intervention and crisis management, and therefore subject to the logic of the police. Elements of private enterprise war, of low-intensity warfare, of counter insurgency, of biopolitical administration, and of the police state of emergency are combined and legitimated as humanitarian mission, civilian-military cooperation, or just war. This war regime follows a calculation of control and security.

Peace-for-War

2006-07-25T10:39+00:00

[Brian Holmes], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 13:00 - 13:30 The concept I'm going to present draws directly from the work of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. It describes the economic phases of "depth" and "breadth," and correlates them with the first- and second-order cybernetics of control. It attempts to situate the functions of cultural-communicational labor within these economic phases. It questions those autonomists who thought it would be possible to transform a broadly expansionary phase of capitalism, like that of the nineties, into a qualitatively different society. It’s not a polemic, but seeks to open up a field of strategic debate. It doesn't assert a future, but observes the unfolding of the present into the depths of violence, which has robbed resistance movements of their potential, again. The concept is Peace-for-War.

National Anthem

2006-07-25T10:09+00:00

[Julieta Aranda], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 12:30 - 13:00 How does nationalism relates to the context of art production? Which countries are showing up regularly within the circle of international art exhibition - and which won't and why?

Mobilization

2006-07-25T09:25+00:00

[Akram Zaatari], Sunday, July 23rd 2006, 12:00 - 12:30 The artist Akram Zaatari defines Mobilization as a kind of eternal propaganda. He is reading a text he wrote some weeks ago describing how found footage and the process of collecting documents became crucial for his work and finally shows his latest video, a work about mobilization.

Liberation

2006-07-25T00:45+00:00

[Ivan Kucina], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 18:30 - 19:00 Every war needs a positive notion - one could be: »Liberation«. Ivan Kucina, architect and lecturer based in Belgrad, speaks about two workshops with his students, questioning the diverse meanings of »liberation« and shows a short documentary.

/join #beirut

2006-07-24T20:31+00:00

[Mansur Jacoubi], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 18:00 - 18:30 We set up a chat module that should allow the participants of the Dictionary in Munich as well as a group of people at the very moment gathering in Beirut to communicate. In order to "Join #Beirut" please click here: http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/chatbox

Discipline

2006-07-24T20:09+00:00

[Ulrich Broeckling], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 17:30 - 18:00 Disciplining in order to fight is "hot" - it mobilizes, transgresses and fuels the passions. Disciplining in order to effectively use force is "cold" - it controls, regularizes, and curbs the affects. The mix ratio is changing and the history of military disciplining can be described as a change between rather "hot" and rather "cold" epochs. Ulrich Bröckling is talking in german but below you could read his lecture in english translation.

Desertion

2006-07-24T19:24+00:00

[Avery Gordon], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 17:00 - 17:30 Absent without permission, it's not only soldiers who desert, or should consider it. What does it mean to be a deserter or to practice desertion? Not furtively, but as an outlaw, a fugitive? Some brief thoughts on disobedience, desertion and other promising conduits to abolishing the disposition to war.

Defeat, for the

2006-07-24T18:45+00:00

[Nora Sternfeld], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 16:30 - 17:00 At 12 o'clock on April 8, 2005, in the Ostarrichi-Park in front of the Landesgericht (the regional court), a temporary monument to the defeat was unveiled that triggered a debate on the process of denazification and made an issue of the fact that this process was still unfinished today. The eight-sided object was conceived as a monumental plinth and it measured 2 meters in height and had a circumference of 11 meters. Nora Sternfeld presents her concept in german but below you could read the english translation.

Declaration of War

2006-07-24T18:17+00:00

[Andcompany&Co], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 16:00 - 16:30 andcompany & Co. Feat. Alexander Karschnia, Nicola Nord, Sascha Sulimma & Co. In their lecture performance KRIEGSERKLÄRUNG they will explain and declare war at the same time, talking in stolen words, quotes borrowed from John L. Austin until Vladimir I. Lenin. For supplementary reading please check out the text "Die Kriegserklärung " by Karl Marx http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me10/me10_168.htm

Camp

2006-07-24T17:36+00:00

[Manuel Herz], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 15:30 - 16:00 Manuel Herz, an architect based in Cologne, analyzes the concept of »Camp« rather in an abstract way but in a specific location, in Chad. One of the poorest countries in the world, pumping oil since several years without any positive effects on the income of the local population, became one of the most important areas for refugees from different countries. Manuel Herz is talking in english, below you'll find the paper of his lecture in german.

Camouflage

2006-07-24T17:16+00:00

[Stefan Römer], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 15:00 - 15:30 The concept of »Camouflage« in its traditional military sense has been classified always as national representation. To camouflage Stefan Römer adds another military concept: showing the flag - whicht got another connotation during Football Worldchampionship 2006 in the privatized and corporated public spaces. As opposed these methods might be in their intention, they seem to serve the same system of representation as the same cultural practices. Speaking about piracy, both methods appear in a single constellation. Could this open up new spaces of action for non representative practices? Stefan Römer is holding his lecture in german.

Amphetamine

2006-07-23T19:42+00:00

[Hans-Christian Dany], Saturday, July 22nd 2006, 14:30 - 15:00 Hans-Christian Dany explains the functionality of Amphetamine and its use in the 20ties and then draws a connection to the military usage of the drug regarding particularly its role in friendly fire actions. He refers to a paradox in reference to the rapid technical diversification within the military and the constant use of the same drug like Amphetamin over a long period of time. He is holding his lecture in german.

Weather

2006-06-05T22:40+00:00

[Dietmar Dath], Saturday, June 3 21:30 - 21:50 The following remarks are intended to elucidate certain notions and practices of political and military semantics pertaining to those forces of nature which we summarize under the umbrella terms "weather" or "climate". Since it is an almost insurmountably difficult task for any speaker to grapple with semantics in a language other than the one she or he is sufficiently fluent in to turn that language's descriptive searchlights on its own workings and intricacies, I've decided to present this talk in German - but for the benefit of those guests who don't speak German at all, let me just give a brief and comprehensive summary of what it's about. Since time immemorial, invaders and defenders of all kinds of territories, whether those terretoires be geographically remote or easily accessible in themselves, had to engage with a third party when fighting each other - the party of mud, rain, wind and meteorological circumstance in general. 80 percent of all air raids in the year 1945, a year as heavy with bombing as few others, took place in bad weather. The response of the military establishment to circumstance such as this have been twofold: on the one hand, they have always tried to shield against such conditions, to evade them or to turn them against the enemy, on the other hand, they have exploited the fear of forces beyond our control in order to become some sort of metaphorical force of nature themselves - it is no coincidence that the extensive high altitude bombing of Vietnam from 1965 on was called "Operation Rolling Thunder" or that the American term for the decisive 1991 gulf war campaign was "Operation Desert Storm". It is a fundamental tenet of psychological warfare that in order to strike terror into the enemies' hearts and minds, one has to convince them that the jurisdiction of political agencies does not cover the army's, or the navy's, or the air force's activities, that is to say: These acts of war presumably move like gale force winds, like tornadoes, they pull the political world of negotiations and compromise out from under you like an earthquake shakes the very ground you're standing on. It is therefore imperative for any sort of succesful anti-militaristic discourse, whether it be analytical, propagandistic or historical, to politicize areas of human action which are being treated as apolitical and primordial by the language of those who would wage war. Weather control may be outside the domain of democratic due process and consensual planning, but weapons control is not.

Trip

2006-06-05T22:39+00:00

[Anselm Franke], Saturday, June 3 21:00 - 21:20 Movements in space and movements of the mind: The trip as the mobilisation of empathy, mimesis and sympathetic magic; between depression and delirium. From Joseph Conrad's outposts to todays checkpoints. From the Gates of Perception to cinematic gestures and sovereign continuity.

Transfer

2006-06-05T22:38+00:00

[Apsolutno], Saturday, June 3 20:30 - 20:50 In this video piece, Association Apsolutno presents the view of the Balkans from the outside as a view which is not direct, but rather mediated through a filter of technology and media representations, based on various assumptions.

Corridors of Subjection

2006-06-05T22:37+00:00

[Angela Melitopoulos], Saturday, June 3 20:00 - 20:20 Timescapes/B-Zone (Becoming Europe Zone) is a collaborative, non-linear video editing project investigating techniques of narration against the power politics of the segmentation of memory and communication located in a (post-) war zone where state politics concerning migration and mobility are thought of as warfare.

Throne of Blood - Moving Forest

2006-06-05T22:36+00:00

[Shu Lea Cheang], Saturday, June 3 19:30 - 19:50 Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" (1957) based on Macbeth was originally titled "SpiderWeb Castle" - tales of ambition ridden lord Washizu (played by Toshiro Mifune) and his vicious lady (played by Isuzu Yamada) set in medieval Japan. Lord Washizu was driven to his downfall following an encounter with a witch in the SpiderWeb forest. " You will never lose a single battle, unless the spider web forest begins to move and approaches the castle." advises the witch to the bewildered Washizu. What follows is the classical plot of betrayal schemes that lead to the final insurgence of Washizu's own archers while the revenging troops marching with tree branches as camouflage towards the castle. Take off from the final scene of "Throne of Blood", I propose a project "moving forest" . The SpiderWeb forest transformed into the deep web forest. The revolt arrives from within. The central power is the imaginary one. The oppositon is AMONG us. The central is AMONG us. Moving forest of today is a forest of wifi transmitter fed on public wireless, moving within the city jungle towards a power deprived central. Moving forest is to be developed as a (global) citywide wifi mobile operatic manoeuver sound event, orchestrated yet asynchronized.

Theatre of Operations

2006-06-05T22:35+00:00

[Celine Condorelli], Saturday, June 3 19:00 - 19:20 Proposal for a theatre of operations for the dictionary of war. Drawing package, references, materials. "It was recognized that the chronologic development of these elements would vary from theater to theater. In theaters where a long buildup period was possible, a fairly elaborate system of communications zone sections or bases would develop well in advance of the rest of the theater elements."

Struggle for Ideas

2006-06-05T22:34+00:00

[Jan Ritsema], Saturday, June 3 18:30 - 18:50 I would never have considered a lecture, considering the notion of war, if I hadn’t gotten this call. But since I got it, I kept hearing myself saying: you need to be more aggressive, you need more war, more aggression, a wider range of weapons than only that of the verbal communication, to enter the battlefield. You have something to fight for, don’t you?

Sound Weapon

2006-06-05T22:33+00:00

[Battery Operated], Saturday, June 3 18:00 - 18:20 The S.P.I.R.A.W.L. (Sound Proofed Institute of Research into Acoustic Weapons Logistics) project is an online documentary. The work focuses on the uses of sound, infrasound and ultrasound as weapons by the military and organisations of civil enforcement. The website can be found at: http://www.batteryoperated.net/spirawl

Rhizomic Maneuver

2006-06-05T22:31+00:00

[Shimon Naveh], Saturday, June 3 17:00 - 17:30 Rhizomic Maneuver is an emergent logic and form of maneuver, that divers from the traditional paradigm. Rhizomic Maneuver is based on disorder, complex geometry, a different epistemology, a different kind of learning. Unlike the industrial manoeuver which is idealistic, rhizomic maneuver is heretical.

Relatively Calm

2006-06-05T22:30+00:00

[Mansur Jacoubi], Saturday, June 3 16:30 - 16:55 "Instead of calming the situation, the army shot at people for no reason... We are trying to calm the situation on both sides and I believe that we have almost succeeded. But the protesters are extremely angry. Some of their friends are dead and they are furious." (Member of the Lebanese Parliament explaining the situation after the shooting of protesters in May 2004)

Pack

2006-06-05T22:29+00:00

[Hans Nieswandt], Saturday, June 3 16:00 - 16:25 Es gibt einen Einsatz. Man wird irgendwo ein- und wieder ausgeflogen. Das schwere Marschgepäck...

Neutrality

2006-06-05T22:27+00:00

[John Palmesino], Saturday, June 3 15:30 - 16:00 Two points seem to be particularly interesting when we think of neutrality as a mean to manage postcocolonial, ethnic, racial, gender, political, social, military, technological, cultural transitions, as a dispositf of change of the contemporary space, tuned to balance the conflictual forces that flare up in almost every human settlement. First of all, in constructing an overview of contemporary human settlements, we are thinking of a world without borders, a world whose parts have become increasingly plugged into each other, and which today is completely cordless at every turn, in which we have migrations of an endless kind almost at every point of the world. The second point is that the implementation of this borderless world is accompanied by an intermingled and entangled overlapping of logistic supply networks, buffer zones, enclaves, extraterritorial bases. Wherever these transitions are occurring, new principles have been theorised to examine the nature of war and contemporary transformation processes. Today, not to have a policy, not to stand for something, not to take part, not to participate, to be a-political is becoming more and more a difficult, contrasted, almost immoral condition. Yet it might be in these very difficulties that to be neutral acquires a novel significance.

NATO (as Architectural Critic)

2006-06-05T22:25+00:00

[Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss + Katherine Carl] Saturday, June 3 15:00 - 15:30 On NATO's misunderstanding of cultural history and its effects on the decision to bomb certain buildings in Belgrade.

Manhood

2006-06-05T22:24+00:00

[Willem de Rooij], Saturday, June 3 14:30 - 15:00 "Representing manhood in the American war against terror: Pat Tillman and Scott Helvenston": Both Tillman and Helvenston played out traditional masculine roles in American public life before enlisting for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The events that followed would colour the personas they had constructed earlier.

Mine

2006-06-05T22:23+00:00

[Thomas Plischke + Kattrin Deufert], Friday, June 2 21:00 - 21:20 The video proposes a sensual study on the fragmented self. The I as container can not contain itself. Selfcontainment is an unfinishable process of oneself being there for the first time and placing yourself and being placed in a constructed historical order. If I was you who were you then? The video is based on Gherasim Luca's "The Inventor of Love".

Luftraum

2006-06-05T22:22+00:00

[Christof Kurzmann], Friday, June 2 20:30 - 21:00 when the iraq war started i made a composition called "the air between". a work about powerlessness. now, quite some time later, and with the images of the war distributed by cnn, bbc, ... i examine what's left of the emotions. how do i/we remember?

Life Support

2006-06-05T22:21+00:00

[Carl Michael von Hausswolff + Thomas Nordanstad], Friday, June 2 20:00 - 20:25

Featherman

2006-06-05T22:18+00:00

[Azza El-Hassan], Friday, June 2 18:30 - 19:00 The Featherman a word that I belive should be included in the dictionary of war. It is the desire and the act of transforming ones self in order to resemble "the other" the enemy. This desire and act usually arises in situations of complete defeat where you find yourself incapable of confronting the other except by mirroring him/her.

Denkfabrik/Think Tank

2006-06-05T22:17+00:00

[Dan Perjovschi], Friday, June 2 18:00 - 18:05 Romania entered the NATO in 2003 and was immediately sending troops into Afghanistan. One of the first battalions that was sent there, had the name of a king from 16th century, called Nicolae Basarab but the US-Army said: Who's that? The Romanians tried to explain: This was our king, this was our hero, this is our past. But the americans said: No way this is too complicated. From now on you will be named „Red Scorpions“.

Conflicted/Inflicted

2006-06-05T22:16+00:00

[Susan Schuppli], Friday, June 2 17:30 - 17:55 "Conflicted/Inflicted" is a video based upon a found telephone answering machine tape belonging to someone named Linda. As we listen to the audio, the crisis and tensions in her life are slowly revealed.

Comrade

2006-06-05T22:15+00:00

[International Festival], Friday, June 2 17:00 - 17:15 I declare war on damaged hair and split-ends. Victory! Because I'm worth it. Kate Moss for L'Oreal The film Comrades venture into the convention of representation, male friendship and the ability to engage emotionally in Hollywood war movies. What notions of friendship and community is it that film industry wish to provide, and how does it differ in respect of the political realities of different time periods. We are Swedish. We surrender.