thing.news _march 2002 thingthing

Sun Mar 10 09:38:18 CET 2002

thing.news contents

1_thing.review
2_thing.threads
3_thing.art
4_thing.rumors
5_thing.complaints
6_thing.recommends
7_thing.politics
8_thing.future
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1_thing.review

Loop - PS1 Contemporary Art Center 
by Brian Boucher - 02/22/2002

She: "Did you ever get déjŕ vu?"
He: "Didn't you just ask me that?"

In Harold Ramis' 1993 film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray 
plays a small-time  weatherman with big dreams and 
a big chip on his shoulder who awakens each day to 
find himself stuck in small-town western Pennsylvania 
on Groundhog Day--a nightmare playing itself out 
again and again. Testifying to the film's success, its 
title has become a sort of shorthand for references to 
eternal repetition-- Bill Murray as the modern  Sisyphus. 
Murray's character, though, finds he can take advantage 
of the situation by correcting his mistakes, improving 
his performance each day, gradually growing enough 
so that he is released from the loop.

Like Murray's character, Klaus Biesenbach, PS1's 
Chief Curator, has found a way to make eternal 
repetition productive, varied, edifying, and in no 
way boring. The loop is everywhere today, the 
exhibition didactics suggested, along with the 
radically different conceptions of time and progress 
to which it gives rise. The loop appears in minimalist
and electronic music in the form of looped samples; 
Biesenbach further suggests that constant media 
repetition as well as science's modification of aging 
and the mapping of the gene are part of the same 
broad phenomenon. Opening in Germany during 
the second week of September, when the media 
was endlessly repeating horrific images of destruction, 
an exhibition based in compulsive repetition had a
particular currency.
http://bbs.thing.net [review]
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2_thing.thread

[new_thing.thread ::undercurrents::]
A forum about the interrelations of cyberfeminism, new 
technologies
and globalization. Moderators: Irina Aristahrkova, Maria 
Fernandez,
Coco Fusco and Faith Wilding.

"I think you also do understand that no one here is trying 
to suggest
that we should not acknowledge the importance of code to 
computerized
culture, or that we should lapse into technophobia. The 
points that
some,
including myself are trying to make have to do with 
technocentrism,
technodeterminism and technoformalism.

By this I mean that alt.net culture on lists like nettime 
has defined
its agenda as technocentric  - open source code,  ownership 
of domain
names, on-line surveillance and so on. The battle for free 
expression
is thus equated with a struggle against state and corporate 
control
of the internet and software, and with the maintenance of 
the non-profit
organizations that sustain the protagonists of these 
struggles. It
creates
a sense of alt.net culture as a dispersed tribe of freedom 
fighters
pitted
against big bad government and Microsoft which is quite 
romantic and
heroic but not exactly accurate.

There are good reasons to be engaged with these issues, but 
there
are even better reasons to question why they are the ONLY 
ones that
are allowed to come to the surface in debate after debate, 
and to
reflect on how the framing of these issues presupposes that 
the
digital commons is beyond race."

_from a recent posting on ::undercurrents::
http://bbs.thing.net [threads]
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3_thing.art

SERVICE2000_7/29  by Nick Crowe was originally shown during
June and July 2000 and consisted of 29 web sites built for 
a range
of commercial and publicly funded London galleries. The work
originated from a chance discovery that many galleries had
either failed to register their own domain names, or had 
only
registered on a single variant on their name - leaving a 
stock
of other usable names readily available. What ensued was
a brief period of not-for-profit cybersquatting during which
times the SERVICE2000 sites functioned as the unofficial
web presence of the London art world.

http://galleries.thing.net/uk/s2k
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4_thing.rumors

An exhibition at the Whitney Independent Study Program 
bringing
together artists working on the politics of  globalization. 
Thus far
works by Martha Rosler, Fatimah Tuggar, Alex Rivera, 
Wolfgang Staehle,
Allan Sekula among others are under consideration. The show 
will
take place at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The [Next 5 Minutes 4] will not only take place in 
Amsterdam - but,
become a distributed event across the globe. They are 
looking at
host sites in North and South America, India and in the 
Middle East.
http://www.n4m.org

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5_thing.complaints

Dear All,

This is a little note to update our friends and colleagues 
about our
recent happenings.

Yesterday in a Zurich court etoy withdrew the complaint 
that demanded
a  preliminary injunction against the publication of our 
book 'Leaving
Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the soul of the 
Internet' which is
due
to published in the UK in May 2002. To us this litigation 
seemed absurd
as  etoy were once the defenders of freedom of expression 
and were now
trying to gag us, the authors of a book which included 
their story and
would take it to a wider audience.

etoy had filed their complaint on January 16th claiming 
that the parts
of the manuscript that etoy had read were full of 'massive 
defamations'
against the etoy.VENTURE association and its members Zai, 
Gramazio
and Kubli. They claimed that we had described etoy as 
a 'dark-ideas-
embracing-sect' which deliberately uses allusions to 
Hitler. They even
went so far as to pretend that we had made etoy out to 
be 'a poor
imitation
of a Taliban in Europe' by ascribing to the group elements 
such as
'totalitarian power', 'oppression of divergent 
behaviour', 'uniforms'
and
'exclusion of joy of life, such as joy, sex etc.' Huh? At 
times the
complaint verged on the comic as when etoy compared their 
fame
amongst the Internet generation to that of the Beatles.

For us the complaint was astonishing because etoy initially 
supported
the project and had taken a substantial amount of money for 
interviews,
access to their archive and rights to use their images. In 
the final
stages
of the book production they had failed to send us in a 
timely manner
written comments about the manuscript in a process we had 
previously
agreed upon, they had not attended a meeting that we had 
invited them
to with our publisher, and Douglas Rushkoff one of their 
one-time
supporters had described our depiction of them as 'fair'.

Instead of an informal process we (and they) were forced to 
spend
tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and the costs of 
the court.
Through the nine hour court hearing etoy took it all very 
seriously.
This
performance seemed to have no artistic intention, and 
lacked the irony
and wit of some of their previous interventions. As an etoy 
shareholder
and former member of the group Esposto who had come along to
support us said: 'It seems like a waste of shareholder's 
money.' In
the end they withdrew their complaint because it was 
obviously futile
to go on. For us it seemed  like a miserable coda to what 
had been
at times a brilliant and insightful art project.

Thanks for your continuous support

Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler [not from etoy.com]

http://www.etoy.com
______________________________________________

6_thing.recommends

After two critically acclaimed NY performances, e-Xplo
returns to the streets of the city with their latest bus 
project,
Picnolepsy:

Picnolepsy. (noun. from the Greek, picnos: frequent).
For the picnoleptic, nothing has happened, the missing
time never existed.

Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner in collaboration with Rene
Gabri will perform electroacoustic music live on a bus 
situating
Manhattan as the backdrop for an investigation using 
attenuated
adaptations of sound and text.

This tour will be one weekend only. So book early!
e-Xplo invites you to what should be an unforgettable tour 
of
the city.

Dates: Friday March 22nd, and Saturday 23rd
Time: Friday and Saturday 7:30 PM and 9:30 PM
Location: 16 Beaver Street, NY NY 10004
Ticket Prices General Tickets 20$ / Reduced 15$
Phone RSVP 866.248.7671 xt. 8114
http://www.e-Xplo.org

"I just wanted to use the Whitney Biennial as a free 
advertisement."
_Miltos Manetas

WhitneyBiennial.com is online now!
The site contains 120 digital art works from 80 
contributors. 
http://WhitneyBiennial.com
______________________________________________

7_thing.politics

John Perry Barlow, Paul Garrin and Christine Wang
talk about ICANN (a/k/a the WTO of the Internet) 
and ICANN's plan to disenfranchise the public from 
the governance of the Internet. Barlow, Garrin, and 
Wang speak out in support of reclaiming public 
space on the  Internet and what we all can do to 
assure democracy, free speech and open 
access to the digital media.
http://FreeTheMedia.org/radio
_________________________________________

8_thing.future

Prevent Nanotech-based Terrorism

In one of his weekly columns on technology and public 
policy for _Tech Central Station_, University of Tennessee 
law professor and Foresight.org Director Glenn Reynolds 
stated that 2001 "was the year that people started  to get 
serious about the promises and dangers of nanotechnology".  
And he concludes: "Where this powerful technology is 
concerned, a nanogram of prevention is worth a kilogram
of cure. Let's start thinking about  nanoterrorism now, 
while 
we have the luxury of time. It's a luxury that won't last 
forever."
http://nanodot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/02/1654253
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 http://bbs.thing.net
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