Accident
Ravi Sundaram - October 24th 2008, 10:10 - 10:40The 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.
Ambient Fears
Nikos Papastergiadis - October 24th 2008, 10:40 - 11:10Ever 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.
Blank Space
Annett Busch & Florian Schneider - October 24th 2008, 11:10 - 11:40"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.
Cold, Coldness, the War of Coldness
Shih-Chieh Ilya Li - October 24th 2008, 11:40 - 12:10As 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.
Conflict within Peace, Peace within Conflict
York W. Chen - October 24th 2008, 14:00 - 14:30In 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.
Dark Matter
Gregory Sholette - October 24th 2008, 15:00 - 15:30Sholette'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.
Insulation
Ashok Sukumaran - October 24th 2008, 16:00 - 16:30Insulation 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.
Loyalty
Sam de Silva - October 24th 2008, 16:30 - 17:00The 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.
Piracy
Tilman Baumgärtel - October 25th 2008, 11:00 - 11:30This 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.
Vacuity, topo, deception, detour, bunker
Ti-Nan Chi - October 25th 2008, 16:00 - 16:30Subtle! 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.
Waiting
Brett Neilson - October 25th 2008, 16:30 - 17:00War 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.
War and Multitude
Ali Akay - October 25th 2008, 17:30 - 18:00Leaving 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.
