I don’t know what others do with all their scraps. Some may keep them around to provide sustenance for future imagination droughts (not a bad idea). I’ve decided to gradually start putting them up here. Arcane research on primarily art, literature, and technology in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties to come! In particular, research on Fluxus, Arakawa, Madeline Gins, Arakawa & Gins, collage & assemblage, intelligent environments, ubiquitous computing, Yoko Ono, William Gibson, and virtual reality… some “locative media”…

Now, will writing this preclude me from getting around to putting these scraps up? Possibly. To neglect all this work would be a shame though.

This video is a parody of political speech in the United States and the binary modes of thinking that shape and are shaped by this political speech. I made the short by subtitling a fight scene from the film Matrix II between Neo and Agent Smith with selected quotes from a debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush. Speech from a particular candidate did not correspond to a particular character in the film. The film was inspired in large part by Craig Baldwin’s talk at the Collage as Cultural Practice Conference at The University of Iowa in 2005.

At the (probably automated) request of the MPAA, Google (probably also through an automated response system) took this video down several years ago. There are no fair or reasonable ways of appealing a take down on YouTube. You can appeal, but Google makes it clear that there are repercussions should your appeal fail. As a parody of both sources, this clip should be considered fair use. Yet because of the dominion of large corporations over politicians, lawmakers, judges, etc., fair use is no longer a defense. No use if fair, these corporations have decided, unless it’s paid for.

Jikkenkobo (koubou) was a multidisciplinary group of artists founded by Toru Takemitsu and Joji Yuasa. From what I’ve discovered about them (they are seldom mentioned in any art history written in English, probably because they don’t fit the mold of ‘imitate and refine’ Japanese) they were a fairly domesticated lot, very unlike their cousins several years later in fluxus. That shouldn’t be discouraging though!

The name as I use it stems from about 2002. When I attempted to bring together a disparate group of artists in Tokyo, a very close friend suggested naming the group jikkenkobo as homage to the original group and its spirit. The name stuck even though the group fizzled after 2 or 3 meetings.

by Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer

Blogger and anarchist Josh Wolf, spending his 57th day in federal prison today for refusing to surrender video he shot of a violent San Francisco protest, is well on his way to becoming the longest-jailed journalist in U.S. history.

To the government, the 24-year-old San Franciscan is hindering a federal grand jury investigation into serious crimes — an attack on a police officer who suffered a fractured skull during the July 2005 rally and the attempted burning of his patrol car.

read more…

There is only one way to put out the fires in Washington…zip!

Kaneko Fumiko, as the link explains, was a Japanese anarchist, opposed to Japanese imperialism in the 20′s, before she was murdered in prison. Will Fusako Shigenobu suffer the same fate? Prison systems don’t have a good track record [period.] with political prisoners.

Possible failed Terror attack in Germany:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5263930.stm

British sell warplanes to Saudi Arabia:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5262120.stm

In the same day, one wonders why it’s necessary to explain why the US and Britain have hypocritical foreign policy.

Just before the Iraq War there were mass protests on every continent – remember? On US and UK news programs there were (former) generals, military analysts, and ‘experts’ of various shades warning, for the most part, that it was unlikely that Saddam Hussein had been developing WMD’s, that ‘liberation’ was likely to bring out sectarian conflict, that Iraq would become an Al Qaida battle ground/ training ground etc. – remember? Now because what these ‘experts’ said bolstered the anti-war movements arguments, they were generally taken on as further proof that war was not a good option. Of course, in the US, this amounted to treason according to fox ‘news.’ (hehe). So, three and a bit years later:
WMD’s – bad intelligence (even though how many million people were saying something else?)
Al Qaida in Iraq
and now:
US echoes Iraq civil war warning.