Fwd: netbehaviour: Art in the Age of Terror

[][mez][]

>Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 12:17:10 +0100
>From: marc <marc.garrett at furtherfield.org>
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>Subject: netbehaviour: Art in the Age of Terror
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>Art in the Age of Terror
>The perils of practicing subversive art in Buffalo.
>
>by Dan Oppenheimer - June 24, 2004
>
>Electronic Civil Disobedience, Digital Resistance and Flesh Machine.
>The movie of The United States v. Steven Kurtz would be film noir. It 
>would begin with an aerial shot of Buffalo photographed in the cool, 
>dystopian, postindustrial blues of that city, and descend past the empty 
>streets and abandoned buildings into the heart of downtown, through the 
>windows of a home in the Allentown neighborhood, the Greenwich Village of 
>Buffalo, where artists, professors and graduate students mingle with the 
>poor and indigent. The camera would rest on a couple in their forties, 
>Steve and Hope Kurtz, lying in bed.
>
>Kurtz would awaken to discover that his wife, Hope Kurtz, wasn´t 
>breathing. He would call 9-1-1. The ambulance would rush to the scene but 
>paramedics would be unable to resuscitate her. The camera would track her 
>body to the hospital, where a white-coated doctor, surrounded by pristine 
>nurses and shadowed in the background by men in brown suits, would 
>pronounce her dead, the cause to be determined later. We would follow the 
>men in brown suits -- agents of the FBI´s Joint Terrorism Task Force -- 
>back to the house, where they would consult, out of earshot, with the 
>mustachioed officers of the Buffalo police department.
>
>A voiceover would begin: On the morning of May 11, 2004, Steve Kurtz, a 
>man of peace, an artist, a professor, woke up to find his wife dead. When 
>the police arrived, they found in his home the tools of an unusual trade: 
>laboratory equipment, samples of bacteria, books on biological warfare and 
>bio-terrorism. Steve Kurtz was an artist, you see, but not an artist like 
>you and I know, not a Vincent van Gogh before a blank canvas, a palette of 
>oils cradled in his arm. He was a private dick in artist´s clothing, a man 
>who haunted the borders of the system, looking for truths in its cracks 
>and trying to expose them to the sunlight. And for that he would pay a price.
>
>Steve Kurtz has not yet been charged with a crime, and so there is no 
>United States v. Kurtz. His life, however, has already been blasted into 
>disarray. I was detained for 22 hours by the FBI, wrote Kurtz in an e-mail 
>to a sympathetic online writer, his only public communication since his 
>wife´s death. They seized my wife´s body, house, cat and car. These items 
>were released a week later. In the house they seized computers, science 
>equipment, chunks of my library, teaching files, ID, and all my research 
>for a new book. The only thing I have gotten back is my wife´s birth 
>certificate.
>
>In particular, the FBI seems interested in his work as a member of the 
>Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an artist collective that explores the 
>intersection of art, technology, politics and the law.
>
>More: 
><http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/Arts/content?oid=oid:71224>http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/Arts/content?oid=oid:71224 
>


.(c)[lick].
-
-

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