Categories
Communiqués

Puerto Rico: Tense Prelude to the Student Strike

From GlobalVoicesOnline.org:

A 48-hour blockade organized by students from the state-run University of Puerto Rico in protest against a proposed $800 annual fee got off to a tense and violent start early Tuesday morning, as students raising barricades around the Río Piedras campus clashed with private security guards hired by the administration.

The day began as students, many of them masked in order to protect their identities, were photographed by the local press [es] as they built and patrolled their barricades in defiance of the administration’s efforts to undermine the protests. Such administrative measures included taking down several University gates [es] around the main campus in Río Piedras early Monday morning, allegedly as a way of guaranteeing entrance to those students, teachers, and employees who showed up for classes and work; and hiring the private security firm Capitol Security, whose guards have proven to be inexperienced and volatile [es] during the first 24 hour cycle of events.

Violent acts were reported and decried by both students and Capitol Security, with one university student allegedly having been beaten by a team of twelve security guards, and several guards allegedly suffering injuries in skirmishes with students. Students and security guards have since declared a truce, according to news reports [es]. Vandalism to school property has also been reported.  Radio Huelga, a ‘pirate’ radio station and website set up by university students during the two-month long strike last semester was able to capture video of the student beating as it took place.

Read more at GlobalVoicesOnline.org


Categories
Features

The Great Firewall of the US and “Wasteful Spending”

I’ll be the occupying editor of Occupy Everything for the rest of the month, because I’m currently an internet refugee. Since UCOP has made it clear that they can and will send the police and the FBI to our door if university servers are used for creating electronic disturbance, my own personal blog has become a space that I can no longer use to write what I want. Everyday it becomes clearer that the internet as a space of freedom is a rapidly disappearing dream. With the latest news about Wikileaks, that the US has cut off their domain name, the country I live in has joined the UK, China, Iran and other countries which filter and control what information can be seen by their populace online. The UK joined this club last year when they took the Pirate Bay offline for UK residents. When I saw Jacob Applebaum speak at The Next Hope hacker conference in New York, I was moved but still held a fundamental question about Wikileaks, will the “truth” change anything? Wikileaks seems to be based on some very modernist notions about truth and democracy, imagining that if people everywhere just knew the truth of the injustice of the Iraq war, that they would rise up and stop it. And yet, such notions as truth and revolution prove to be increasingly bankrupt and the possibility of an uprising presupposes that political passion could overcome the crushing realities of poverty and hunger, or the constant fear of death and the loss of family and friends that so many of us seem to be right on the edge of as we try to just maintain our lives, or the struggle to survive that so many queer people, people of color, differnently abled people and more feel everyday in a society that wants us dead. Still, I am consistently impressed at how much of a threat governments see Wikileaks as, stopping and searching their volunteers at borders, exploiting border control legislation to further political ends, sending federal agents after founder Julian Assange, jailing Bradley Manning for submitting data to Wikileaks and threatening to execute Assange. For links and so much more amazing news, if you haven’t already, see Wikileaks’ twitter feed. Here’s a tweet I appreciated:

RT @JPBarlow:
The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. #WikiLeaks

Another amazing story in this information war is that of AAARG.ORG, but that is a long post for another day.

Apparently the control over information and protection of copyrights for corporations is a far higher priority for governments than freedom of expression, and yet this is just the latest example of how the crisis of capital is really a crisis of priorities of the rulers. While the economy is supposedly taking a downturn and corporations get billion dollar handouts while students and workers are asked to work more for less money, there are always funds to send the police to kick down doors to protect Apple’s patents and the FBI to protect UCOP’s servers. All around me, the effects of the budget cuts that we’ve struggled against so hard are taking effect. Next school quarter, I might not have a job or health care, and my partner and many of my friends are all scrambling to find a way to pay for their education, as all of our jobs have been cut. The class that I’ve been teaching for a year at UCSD has been cut from the curriculum in response to the budget cuts, and as classes are cut TA jobs for those classes are also disappearing.

As the situation continues to worsen in California, the resistance seems to have slowed, hit with the weapon of bureaucracy as hundreds of us respond to investigations and criminal charges for our actions to resist the cuts. Part of this response to stop the resistance has included shutting down information flows, including noncompliant websites that facilitate disturbance, communities that value human expression over copyright controls and communities that value human life over keeping secrets. To try to stave off this loss of online freedom, some have proposed that hackers and developers take direct action and route around the information oppression. The Pirate Bay has proposed the creation of a P2P DNS system, which would prevent governments like the US from taking down sites who’s political views they disagree with, since of course copyright is just another political position and copyfight is a form of resistance. I also proposed, along with other bang lab members, a plan to use wireless routers and mesh networking to rout around phone companies control over the infrastructure of the internet called autonet, which we unfortunately have devoted very little time to making happen. These projects can be seen in the spirit of Fluxus’ call for artists to create infrastructure, except instead of creating magazines to mail out, we have to create an entire postal service. I can only hope that this post, the beginning of my online occupation of this site, is not deemed too disruptive to the information controls to be deported from the online public space of the internet.

Still everyday new resistance springs up, such as 400,000 Italian students taking the streets with the slogan “You block our futures, we block your cities” and universities all over the UK have been occupied, blockaded and have gone on strike. These events serve as a huge inspiration to me to keep on livin. New right-wing forms of resistance, though, are also popping up. Nick Knouf, who created the MAICgregator project which inserts into websites an augmented overlay of information about military and pharmaceutical ties, recently posted about the latest right-wing crowd-sourcing project and his attempts to thwart it. Nick writes on his blog:

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Attacks on NSF Funding

Eric Cantor ( R ), the incoming House majority leader, is asking people to look for ‘wasteful’ National Science Foundation (NSF) funding. In his view, this would include projects that can be found using the keywords “success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus”. Cantor asks people to search for these keywords on the NSF website, make note of the offending award numbers, and submit them to a web-based form. This is an instance of so-called “crowd-sourcing” being used against the very researchers who are key in developing and studying this phenomenon.

I have written a simple script to upload your own “suggestions” to this form. These suggestions consist of texts such as Alice’s Adventues in Wonderland, Capital, Communist Manifesto, and works by De Sade. Additionally, the uploads come from referers such as “http://let.the.air.force.have.a.bake.sale.to.raise.money.gov” and “http://learn.about.research.before.you.cut.what.you.dont.know.gov”. The project follows in a long line of similar interventions such as the FloodNet by EDT and b.a.n.g. lab.

Note: the script that processes the results of the form on Cantor’s site is actually hosted on the personal site of Matt Lira, well-known technical operative of the GOP. Thus this script never connects to any .gov website.

The script and accompanying text files can be downloaded here. All you need is python 2.5 or higher to run. Comments at the top of the file explain any changes you might want to make.

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In the spirit of blog writing, this is just what I’ve been thinking about. Maybe you just thought tl;dr. Hopefully, I’ll be posting more throughout the month. I look forward to your feedback! Enjoy…


Categories
Communiqués

Occupying Editor 03: Micha Cardenas

Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist whose transreal work mixes physical and networked spaces in order to explore emerging forms of queer relationality, biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production. She is a lecturer in the Visual Arts department and Critical Gender Studies program at UCSD. She is an artist/researcher with UCSD Medical Education and the b.a.n.g. lab at Calit2. Her recent publications include “I am Transreal”, in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation from Seal Press, Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, with Barbara Fornssler, from Atropos Press and “Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study” in Code Drift from CTheory. Her collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, “Mixed Relations,” was the recipient of the UCIRA Emerging Fields Award for 2009. She has exhibited and performed in biennials, museums and galleries in cities around the world including Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Dublin, Ireland and many other places. Her work has been written about in publications including Art21, the Associated Press, the LA Times, CNN, BBC World, Wired and Rolling Stone Italy.

Categories
Communiqués

OCCUPY EVERYTHING (NOW)

We’ve built, seemingly by vulgar and beautiful chance, a party. The occupation. The mob. A mobile force. A machine. This is to say many of us are you, and likely many of you are us. We are all bound together merely by inhabiting the same arena. But we are also adventurists. – Anticapital Projects

Useful dreams are only dreamt in struggle.- Anonymous


OCCUPY EVERYTHING calls on all cultural workers, artists, filmmakers, film schools, media labs, art schools and universities–private and public–to join the struggle for access to higher education and the humanities NOW.

NOW is the time to claim/reclaim our commons and demonstrate solidarity with  occupations in Southern California and internationally such as those at Goldmiths and Slade. In Southern California, this call extends to those at CalArts, OTIS, USC, Art Center, Art Institutes, and those in art, film and media departments across the  California (UC/CSU/Community Colleges) higher education system.

As cultural workers located both inside and outside universities we identify direct action and occupations as acts of creation and protest. We feel the daily occupation of our spaces by the forces of capital and capitalist logic. To our peers, students, friends: administration offices and buildings belong to you; these are your studios – this is your work. Remaking your department, art school, film school and the world starts NOW.

From University buildings to train stations to banks to political party headquarters, a new territory is being mapped out at the very moment it is being created.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING.


Useful dreams are only dreamt in struggle.


Categories
Communiqués

The Occupation of Slade School of Fine Art

source: artsagainstcuts

“We believe that the current proposed cuts to university funding threaten the existence of arts and humanities education in England and Wales. It is for this reason that we have made the decision to occupy the Slade School of Art building. We demand that the government provide the same protection for arts and humanities in universities as is provided for the sciences. We vehemently oppose the transformation of the university system into market based model; education should be a public debate, not a private economy.

Therefore we the students of the Slade are offering a space for the assembly of all art colleges in England in order to organise non-violent direct action against what we view as an attack by the government on the arts. This is not a virtual exchange, this is a physical assembly. We are demonstrating the value of physical space for art education through the continuation of our day-to-day activity, as well as by inviting other colleges to participate in open events, lectures and workshops. Our occupation is not designed to be disruptive, nor will it engender any damage to the building. Rather, we want to highlight the value of intellectual and cultural exchange within art courses. This is not a boycott, it is an act of support.
As well as fully supporting the demands of the existing UCL occupation of the Jeremy Bentham Room, the staff and students of the Slade School of Fine Art demand the following from UCL:
  • A statement from the UCL provost condemning the cuts to arts and humanities courses and stating the intrinsic value of these courses within higher education.
  • A statement from the UCL provost guaranteeing the protection of the Slade’s courses as they are. This means preserving the current staff to student ratio, protecting facilities and space and continuing funding for visiting lecturers.
  • A statement from the UCL provost guaranteeing the survival and continued funding of all other humanities courses within UCL.
  • Free access in and out of the building 24 hours for all students, peers and speakers for the duration of the occupation.
  • Ensure no victimisation or repercussions for anyone participating in the occupation.”