Video recordings

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.

New York, September 26th 2009, 15:30

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.

New York, September 26th 2009, 18:00

New York, September 26th 2009, 17:30

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.

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.

New York, September 26th 2009, 15:00

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.

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.

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.

New York, September 26th 2009, 12:00

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.

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.

Dictionay of War Taipei, October 25th 2008

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.