Originally from .blindness. reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 16, 2008, 3:51AM
Are Black Holes Two-Way Streets?
From Science:
Black holes are just about the least friendly places in the universe. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, they're so powerful that they warp space and time, and they've condensed so much matter and energy into a tiny point called a singularity that nothing, not even light, can escape. Getting sucked down a black hole should be a one-way trip. But is it? Stephen Hawking thought so. Back in the 1970s, the eminent physicist hypothesized that a black hole eventually--over time scales lasting trillions of years--would evaporate into nothingness. The problem for Hawking's idea was that it clashed with quantum mechanics, of which one of the primary tenets is that information cannot be lost. Hawking could not reconcile the conflict, and a few years ago he recanted his position on information loss.
Now, physicists from Pennsylvania State University in State College have shown that Hawking was right to change his mind. Delving into a cousin of quantum mechanics called quantum gravity, Abhay Ashtekar and colleagues Victor Tavares and Madhavan Varadarajan calculate that singularities cannot exist. According to relativity, a singularity is essentially a frontier where spacetime ends. As such, nothing should be able to escape it. But complex calculations by Ashtekar's team show that singularities are not allowed by quantum gravity. That means that although the center of a black hole may be very, very dense, it's not so dense that it traps information forever. "Quantum spacetime doesn't end at a singularity," Ashtekar says.
7 insane conspiracies that actually happened
Cracked has a fun list of seven crazy but real conspiracies. #7. The Business Plot The Plan: In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
How did that work out?: A good rule of thumb: never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup for you. Besides being no fan of fascism, Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.
Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.
Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America's entry into World War II.
Link
Lebanon: Back from the Abyss??
While the situation in Lebanon remains uncertain, Lebanese bloggers keep writing about their fears, pain and disappointment.
Of course, there is new hope: a deal brokered by the Arab League to end the strikes which have brought Lebanon to the brink of second civil war is being finalized.
But all signs point to a deal made on terms highly favorable to Hezbollah, which, according one blogger, means a return to peace is an “illusion.”
Here is a small selection of what some of those who write in French have to say.
Chroniques beyrouthines has been updating several times daily, with detailed bullet points of all the major events in Lebanon. As I write, they are on Day 8.
Le Jour du tac tac writes about the Homs road to Syria, rumored to be partially open; it eventually leads to the airport at Damascus, where the hotels are full of Lebanese attempting to flee. There are rumors: shuttles from Jounieh port and Beirut may run again tomorrow. The airport may reopen. tac tac writes:
Faut-il y croire? impossible de se prononcer pour le moment. Ne jamais planifier ni se projeter dans l’avenir lorsqu’on est libanais. Une leçon importante que nos politiciens tentent de nous rappeler, trop souvent peut-être.
Should we believe this? Impossible to say for the moment. Don't ever plan or project into the future when you are Lebanese. An important lesson that our politicians tend to make us remember, perhaps a little too often.Last week, Frencheagle was so incensed and pained by the crisis in his country, he “>contemplated the temporary closure of his blog.
Your Rights as a Photographer
There’s been some buzz the past couple of days about an incident on a Red Line platform in which a man was told he couldn’t take pictures because of the “9/11 Law.” A transcript of the entire ridiculous exchange between the photog and Metro is available here on BoingBoing. (Metro employees really should refrain from using profanity when addressing transit patrons. Remember, the customer is always right.)
This controversy is not new. It’s happened before. Many, many times. It’s happened about buildings. It’s happened with polling stations. Even LAist decided to get some answers from the man.
Commander Dan Finkelstein, Chief of Transit Police for Metro, told LAist over the phone that there is no such law against photography.
He explained that there are no laws affecting Metro properties regarding personal photography and that being questioned by police is routine, something no more or less than being pulled over for having your tail light out.
So, what CAN you take pictures of in L.A.? Luckily, some lawyerly dude crafted THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S RIGHT, a downloadable PDF that should fold nicely into your camera bag. Did you know that you can legally photograph bridges, residential and commercial buildings, transportation facilities, and law enforcement officers?
Have fun this weekend, artist.
Photo from malingering’s photostream
Urban Natures: Of Fields and Forests (2007)
Mumbai, Dharavi 2007
Stan Allen & James Corner (2005) have devised a useful concept - urban natures - that comes pretty close to airoots’ understanding of cities - but not close enough. This is about the crucial conceptual gap.
They observe that “the difference between city, country, and suburb is fast disappearing”. What is left is “field urbanism” marked by “points of intensity and exchange”. The field itself is diverse and in constant flux. It forms what could be called an urban ecology, with its topography, milieus, communities and networks. In their words, “these new city forms…are composed of small units and collectives rather than singularities, and bottom up organizations rather than top-down orders.”
Eventually they seek to replace the notion of the city as yoked to the world of planning and urban design by that of the image of a cultivated field. However, there may be good reason to believe that the world of habitats as seen through both these sets of images ultimately land up producing versions of each other. After all they are shaped by very similar notions of what constitutes patterns of ownership and propriety, order and organization. The cultivated field is also a grided, organized world. Yet the urban experience for a vast majority of people in the world today falls outside these patterns altogether. Millions of people live in spaces that qualify to be the very opposite of the systematic urban worlds that we have come to expect as the valid city. How do we account for ‘urban nature’ embodied in that experience?
We are not talking only about slums, favelas and shanties here. We are also thinking of some of the most developed, technologically advanced and futuristic cities in the world, such as Tokyo.
The Chinese Far West
Just spent 3 days in Rome to check out FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in several venues throughout the city.
In a time when most photo festivals focus on urbanity, chaos or sustainability, the theme chosen by FotoGrafia this year is very brave: "Seeing normality. Photography portrays daily life".
First stop was the Palazzo delle Esposizioni there were several shows by young photographers but one of the photo series was so striking (and so far away from what you and i would regard as "normality"), i spent the rest of my stay in the Italian capital obsessing about it. Chinese Wild West, a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel, follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in African lands.
As they explain: To quench its thirst for oil, its hunger for copper, uranium and wood, Beijing has sent out its state companies and its adventurous entrepreneurs to conquer Africa.
For the 500.000 Chinese who have emigrated to the 'dark continent' there is the promise of a 21st century Wild West. Some have struck gold and run large conglomerates that span whole regions of Africa, others are still selling their cheap goods on the burning hot roadsides of the poorest countries in the world.
For the Africans, the arrival of the Chinese is perhaps the most important event of the forty years of independence. The Chinese do not look like the former colonialists. They build roads, dams and hospitals and win over the people. They speak neither of democracy nor transparency and they win over the dictators.Woods and Michel conclude their presentation of the work with these words: These are rare images: Beijing wants to keep a low profile for its conquest. But though it remains largely unexposed these photographs portray a phenomenon, a new dimension of globalization, that threatens to leave the West behind.
Puzzle of Bombings in Jaipur
The bombings that shook Jaipur and killed 80 innocents are not immediately legible as ordinary politics. Most previous such bombings (Bombay, Hyderabad) have been in areas that have important Muslim minorities, or have been connected to separatist movements such as in Assam. Some appear to have been the work of Muslim radicals and intended as revenge on the Bharatiya Janata Party for its ties to RSS goon squads that have engaged in pogroms against Muslims. But Jaipur in Rajasthan is heavily Hindu and is not politically symbolic. Its main claim to fame is as a tourist attraction.
I don't agree with the Indian analysts who suggest that the site of the attack is arbitrary, or that it has something to do with the new government in Pakistan, which is more favorable to India than the previous one. A general attempt to foment Hindu-Muslim tension may be part of it, but then why did the perpetrators not announce themselves?
Possible considerations are that unlike most of India's provinces now, Rajasthan is run by the BJP. So this attack could be a strike against that party. A bombing in Jaipur clearly is intended to hurt India's tourist economy. Since tourism revenues in Jaipur at the moment benefit the BJP, these horrific bombings could be intended to harm the provincial government.
Terrorists have their own awful logic, however, so other considerations may have played a role.
Originally from Informed Comment by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 14, 2008, 4:20AM
Just Another British Torture Sanctuary?
[Image: An aerial photograph of Rawalpindi showing the interrogation centre. Photograph: Getty Images, via The Guardian.]
Well, it looks like we have another clandestine room to file away in the emerging architecture of the War on Terror’s pantheonic library of secret military spaces. A few days ago the Guardian reported that a secret interrogation center had been discovered in Pakistan, specifically in the Saddar district of Rawalpindi. The site, unsurprisingly, is “surrounded by high walls and watchtowers,” and “bristl(es) with surveillance cameras.” It is, however, notorious enough that so far local photographers have not dared to take any photos of it.
The site is run by the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) who has been accused of meddling in foreign affairs with Afghanistan through its own connections with terrorist groups there.
Interestingly enough, this site has come to light as a depot for British terrorism suspects, not Arab suspects, who allege they were tortured there after UK authorities had them arrested.
It’s been brewing in the British media for months, British terrorist suspects claiming they've been abused in this Pakistan detention facility while British military and other UK officials had previously interviewed them and merely stood by. Detainees who have since been released from this place claim that M15 agents (the UK’s national security service) “instigated the torture of British citizens or, at very least, turned a blind eye to their mistreatment.”
[Image: The London headquarters of MI5. Photograph: Frank Baron, via The Guardian.>]
So, which intelligence agency are we accusing of what, exactly?
Regarding the facility itself, one of the released suspects said this:
(He) “was one of several prisoners kept in an underground block of 10 small cells, each with a mattress and a pillow. The torture, he says, took place nearby in a carpeted room with bright overhead lights, a table, several chairs and a small wooden stool where prisoners were expected to sit. In one corner of the room was a camera. He says that sometimes he would be hooded and driven for 20 minutes to meet two MI5 officers; on other occasions they would question him in the room where he had been tortured.”
However, another equally curious and nefarious dimension to the cloaks of secrecy surrounding this site is how the British Foreign Office has responded to questions about their role in the interrogations taking place there, and how it's assumed that with the M15’s presence there they certainly must have known British citizens were being tortured.
Asked about this failure, the Foreign Office said it could not act for British citizens of joint British-Pakistani nationality, as the authorities in Islamabad regarded them as being only Pakistani.
Ali Dayan Hasan, the south Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: "I find it worrying that the British high commission has sought refuge behind the dual citizenship clause when it knows that the detainee's life may be in danger and that the detention is illegal under Pakistani, British and international law."
So, the Pakistani interrogation center, in conjunction with this dual nationality technicality, becomes a sanctuary for British authorities to deny accountability and to essentially shield themselves from any ethical responsibility of their own. It’s just totally fascinating to me how a given site could serve this dual purpose. On one hand, acting as a literal space of torture, while on the other as a kind of abstract political shelter for an insidious observant form of indirect participation in torture. I wonder, which came first: the facility, the M15's presence, and then the dual nationality card, or was this political shielding first determined and then used to open up a way for the UK's involvement in these arrests and interrogations?
Anyway, more on all of this here:
MI5 agents and torture abroad
MI5 accused of colluding in torture of terrorist suspects Originally from Subtopia by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 14, 2008, 4:25PM
Boullée in North Dakota
From the HABS/HAER collections in the Library of Congress comes these gorgeous photographic documentations of an anti-ballistic missile complex in North Dakota.
Several such sites were planned as part of the Safeguard Program, but only this was ever completed. And after being in operations for just 4 months, it was deactivated.
In the years since, countless drunken youths and their spray paints have made pilgrimages to these Pharaonic ruins of the U.S. Army. No doubt one of them must have wondered whether if it was simply a matter of coincidence that this pyramid, whose walls he was pissing on, resembles the unfinished pyramid in the the Great Seal of the United States, its once radar equipment being the Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye.
Or if the military counts among its ranks a cabal of Freemasons constantly and surreptitiously finding ways to channel their aesthetic inclinations, in the face of institutionalized prohibition against self-expression and individuality. Sculpted berms here, geometrically-patterned rows of exhaust stacks there, mastaba-shaped radar facility right over there, chalked footpaths everywhere.
The U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a form of Land Art.
One of his companions, a blogger of the built environment, will report his inebriated musings, speculating further that those anonymous soldier-bureaucrat-architects must have been great admirers of the unbuilt works of Étienne-Louis Boullée. As an homage, they designed the radar building in the form of the master's pyramidal cenotaphs.
Even their monument-complex are pierced with holes, this blogger will blog, although they are not cosmically aligned. You will not see stars; they do not form constellations. Rather, they are aligned to millions of city dwellers halfway around the world, under surveillance, targeted for total erasure.
where truces and cease fires grow on trees…
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
While the "inner German border” that once divided East and West Germany decades ago, stretching 879 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic, was a tangled jungle of barbed wire, landmines, booby traps and soldier patrols, it was also, much like the Korean DMZ, a kind of sanctuary for considerable wildlife.
When the Berlin Wall fell German environmentalists fought to protect the long line of no-man’s-land as a Green Belt, connecting it with Europe’s larger green belt that has followed the path of the Iron Curtain from the north of Finland south to the Adriatic Sea.
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
Up until now the German Green Belt has had very little legal protection, and while it still has a long ways to go, Spiegel reports that the groundwork for a new agreement between the federal Government and the local German states which directly assume responsibility for the Green Belt have reached some form of legal outlines for its protection. Currently, only a third of the natural corridor is designated a nature conservation area, but that could soon be increased. The Green Belt itself though is of great interest.
The no-man's-land that emerged, ranging from 60 to 200 meters wide, provided the ideal conditions for the flourishing of flora and fauna. Up to 600 endangered species, including the black stork and the lady's slipper orchid, thrived in this unusual terrain.
What has made this green corridor remarkable is the interlocking of over 100 types of biotopes, including forests, fens and meadows. Hubert Weiger, president of BUND, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday that "in other places species become extinct because their habitats shrink to islands due urban sprawl." According to Geidezis this is unique in Central Europe. "You don't find these connecting biotopes in Europe any more. Most have been split up, preventing animals from traveling from place to place."
I will leave you to go read about the details of the legal proceedings that aim to protect the Green Belt. I am more curious about what perhaps it could symbolize in a heightened era of protracted border security.
What if somehow in a great show of geopolitical magic all of the border fences, boundary walls and separation barriers that callous the world’s neighborly skin suddenly vanished? Miles of scrappy national security architecture just dissolved in a great disappearing act leaving only trails of dirt behind on its barren stage. And then, over the course of a few years, filling in these tracts of severed farms and semi-conquered wetlands, of annexed soils and halved rural pasturtopias, new post-conflict species of borderzone flora and fauna colored in the rugged footprints with epic flourishes of greenery.
Forgive me for sounding ridiculously hippie dippie here, but imagine the borders of the future bound in bloom instead of barricade; crossings blended by mossy sutures rather than surgical fences and political non-futures.
Suppose these old curvilinear scars of border space could be remade into the world’s longest and narrowest public parks project. Bi-national teams of landscape architects and horticulturalists are organized from both sides of all the old fences. Each region designs its own celestial garden corridor -- a strip garden in a long line of international strip gardens -- that turns the remnant jetties of border conflict into opulent open air greenhouses shared and protected by joint nations. Local cross-border communities would maintain them. Dignitaries from all over the world would hail them as these long lush paths to political healing, while travelers and ecologists would wander down the rolling green carpets siphoning unsmelled fragrances through their nostrils and basking in the Eden like experience of post-militarized botanical reverie. The border grown into the geography of a dispersed global ecological refuge. Stitching nations together with enclaves of freshly oxygenated public space these elongated nature preserves would help to spawn innovative conservation policy, allow new species to emerge, and even old ones to re-emerge. Call them peace parks, green belts, border gardens, whatever, Subtopia will surely be there enjoying an eternal picnic under those canopies where truces and cease fires grow on trees. Originally from Subtopia by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 3:13PM
Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible
A lecture by Trevor Paglen
Friday, May 23rd
8pm
Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen explores the network of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people that military
and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Over the course of his talk, Paglen will lead us from “non-existent” Air Force and CIA
installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home.
Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give
rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.
They’ve also given rise to an incredible catalog of black-ops iron-on membership patches that have to be seen to be believed. The visual language of patches and symbols from black projects recalls other symbolic systems that have surprisingly long traditions. For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that, which by definition, cannot or must not be represented. Sometimes the answer is in repurposed religious symbology; sometimes it’s taking a cue from the Insane Clown Posse.
FREE!
Originally from machine project by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 12:34PM
Robert Rauschenberg, RIP
Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The artist at his home and studio in Captiva Island, Fla. in 2005.
via NYTimes:
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.
Mr. Rauschenberg's work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," forinstance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. "Monogram" was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a paintedpanel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint,as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons ofpostwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker,choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years,even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that anartist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimesreconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornelland others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting andsculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking,sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture andtechnology, technology and performance art - not to mention between artand life.
Bordering on Debord’s Board Game (or, Professor Accused of Infringing Copyright of Man Who Opposed Copyright)
KRIEGSPIEL
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War"
Produced for computer by RSG
Screen shot courtesy of m.river, flickr.com
via WaterCoolerGames:
Wark on Debord
April 15, 2008 - by Ian Bogost
Following our coverage of the legal flap around Alex Galloway's digital adaptation of Guy Debord's Game of War, McKenzie Wark (author of the excellent book Gamer Theory) has published a short, thoughtful essay on Debord's original. The piece is forthcoming in Wark's new book project, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972.
via post.thing.net and interactivist info exchange, 04/23/2008:
{additional links courtesy of newsgrist}
Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright
What ever happened to the Art of Giving?
Dean Robert Storr, explores the consequences of when patrons wrestle power from museum curators and directors. What does such a move mean for the public?In the end Storr thinks Eli Broad should have just gone traditional. However, the public not LACMA is the real looser.Frieze Magazine Originally from Archinect.com Feed, ReBlogged by jwinter on May 13, 2008 at 09:40 AM
Originally from Eyebeam reBlog reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 7:40AM
From Science:
Now, physicists from Pennsylvania State University in State College have shown that Hawking was right to change his mind. Delving into a cousin of quantum mechanics called quantum gravity, Abhay Ashtekar and colleagues Victor Tavares and Madhavan Varadarajan calculate that singularities cannot exist. According to relativity, a singularity is essentially a frontier where spacetime ends. As such, nothing should be able to escape it. But complex calculations by Ashtekar's team show that singularities are not allowed by quantum gravity. That means that although the center of a black hole may be very, very dense, it's not so dense that it traps information forever. "Quantum spacetime doesn't end at a singularity," Ashtekar says.
7 insane conspiracies that actually happened
Cracked has a fun list of seven crazy but real conspiracies. #7. The Business Plot The Plan: In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
How did that work out?: A good rule of thumb: never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup for you. Besides being no fan of fascism, Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.
Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.
Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America's entry into World War II.
Link
#7. The Business PlotLinkThe Plan: In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
How did that work out?: A good rule of thumb: never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup for you. Besides being no fan of fascism, Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.
Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.
Though many of the people who had allegedly backed the Business Plot also maintained financial ties with Nazi Germany up through America's entry into World War II.
Lebanon: Back from the Abyss??
While the situation in Lebanon remains uncertain, Lebanese bloggers keep writing about their fears, pain and disappointment.
Of course, there is new hope: a deal brokered by the Arab League to end the strikes which have brought Lebanon to the brink of second civil war is being finalized.
But all signs point to a deal made on terms highly favorable to Hezbollah, which, according one blogger, means a return to peace is an “illusion.”
Here is a small selection of what some of those who write in French have to say.
Chroniques beyrouthines has been updating several times daily, with detailed bullet points of all the major events in Lebanon. As I write, they are on Day 8.
Le Jour du tac tac writes about the Homs road to Syria, rumored to be partially open; it eventually leads to the airport at Damascus, where the hotels are full of Lebanese attempting to flee. There are rumors: shuttles from Jounieh port and Beirut may run again tomorrow. The airport may reopen. tac tac writes:
Faut-il y croire? impossible de se prononcer pour le moment. Ne jamais planifier ni se projeter dans l’avenir lorsqu’on est libanais. Une leçon importante que nos politiciens tentent de nous rappeler, trop souvent peut-être.
Should we believe this? Impossible to say for the moment. Don't ever plan or project into the future when you are Lebanese. An important lesson that our politicians tend to make us remember, perhaps a little too often.Last week, Frencheagle was so incensed and pained by the crisis in his country, he “>contemplated the temporary closure of his blog.
While the situation in Lebanon remains uncertain, Lebanese bloggers keep writing about their fears, pain and disappointment.
Of course, there is new hope: a deal brokered by the Arab League to end the strikes which have brought Lebanon to the brink of second civil war is being finalized.
But all signs point to a deal made on terms highly favorable to Hezbollah, which, according one blogger, means a return to peace is an “illusion.”
Here is a small selection of what some of those who write in French have to say.
Chroniques beyrouthines has been updating several times daily, with detailed bullet points of all the major events in Lebanon. As I write, they are on Day 8.
Le Jour du tac tac writes about the Homs road to Syria, rumored to be partially open; it eventually leads to the airport at Damascus, where the hotels are full of Lebanese attempting to flee. There are rumors: shuttles from Jounieh port and Beirut may run again tomorrow. The airport may reopen. tac tac writes:
Faut-il y croire? impossible de se prononcer pour le moment. Ne jamais planifier ni se projeter dans l’avenir lorsqu’on est libanais. Une leçon importante que nos politiciens tentent de nous rappeler, trop souvent peut-être.
Should we believe this? Impossible to say for the moment. Don't ever plan or project into the future when you are Lebanese. An important lesson that our politicians tend to make us remember, perhaps a little too often.
Last week, Frencheagle was so incensed and pained by the crisis in his country, he “>contemplated the temporary closure of his blog.
Your Rights as a Photographer
There’s been some buzz the past couple of days about an incident on a Red Line platform in which a man was told he couldn’t take pictures because of the “9/11 Law.” A transcript of the entire ridiculous exchange between the photog and Metro is available here on BoingBoing. (Metro employees really should refrain from using profanity when addressing transit patrons. Remember, the customer is always right.)
This controversy is not new. It’s happened before. Many, many times. It’s happened about buildings. It’s happened with polling stations. Even LAist decided to get some answers from the man.
Commander Dan Finkelstein, Chief of Transit Police for Metro, told LAist over the phone that there is no such law against photography.
He explained that there are no laws affecting Metro properties regarding personal photography and that being questioned by police is routine, something no more or less than being pulled over for having your tail light out.
So, what CAN you take pictures of in L.A.? Luckily, some lawyerly dude crafted THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S RIGHT, a downloadable PDF that should fold nicely into your camera bag. Did you know that you can legally photograph bridges, residential and commercial buildings, transportation facilities, and law enforcement officers?
Have fun this weekend, artist.
Photo from malingering’s photostream
There’s been some buzz the past couple of days about an incident on a Red Line platform in which a man was told he couldn’t take pictures because of the “9/11 Law.” A transcript of the entire ridiculous exchange between the photog and Metro is available here on BoingBoing. (Metro employees really should refrain from using profanity when addressing transit patrons. Remember, the customer is always right.)
This controversy is not new. It’s happened before. Many, many times. It’s happened about buildings. It’s happened with polling stations. Even LAist decided to get some answers from the man.
Commander Dan Finkelstein, Chief of Transit Police for Metro, told LAist over the phone that there is no such law against photography.
He explained that there are no laws affecting Metro properties regarding personal photography and that being questioned by police is routine, something no more or less than being pulled over for having your tail light out.
So, what CAN you take pictures of in L.A.? Luckily, some lawyerly dude crafted THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S RIGHT, a downloadable PDF that should fold nicely into your camera bag. Did you know that you can legally photograph bridges, residential and commercial buildings, transportation facilities, and law enforcement officers?
Have fun this weekend, artist.
Photo from malingering’s photostream
Urban Natures: Of Fields and Forests (2007)
Mumbai, Dharavi 2007
Stan Allen & James Corner (2005) have devised a useful concept - urban natures - that comes pretty close to airoots’ understanding of cities - but not close enough. This is about the crucial conceptual gap.
They observe that “the difference between city, country, and suburb is fast disappearing”. What is left is “field urbanism” marked by “points of intensity and exchange”. The field itself is diverse and in constant flux. It forms what could be called an urban ecology, with its topography, milieus, communities and networks. In their words, “these new city forms…are composed of small units and collectives rather than singularities, and bottom up organizations rather than top-down orders.”
Eventually they seek to replace the notion of the city as yoked to the world of planning and urban design by that of the image of a cultivated field. However, there may be good reason to believe that the world of habitats as seen through both these sets of images ultimately land up producing versions of each other. After all they are shaped by very similar notions of what constitutes patterns of ownership and propriety, order and organization. The cultivated field is also a grided, organized world. Yet the urban experience for a vast majority of people in the world today falls outside these patterns altogether. Millions of people live in spaces that qualify to be the very opposite of the systematic urban worlds that we have come to expect as the valid city. How do we account for ‘urban nature’ embodied in that experience?
We are not talking only about slums, favelas and shanties here. We are also thinking of some of the most developed, technologically advanced and futuristic cities in the world, such as Tokyo.
Mumbai, Dharavi 2007
Stan Allen & James Corner (2005) have devised a useful concept - urban natures - that comes pretty close to airoots’ understanding of cities - but not close enough. This is about the crucial conceptual gap.
They observe that “the difference between city, country, and suburb is fast disappearing”. What is left is “field urbanism” marked by “points of intensity and exchange”. The field itself is diverse and in constant flux. It forms what could be called an urban ecology, with its topography, milieus, communities and networks. In their words, “these new city forms…are composed of small units and collectives rather than singularities, and bottom up organizations rather than top-down orders.”
Eventually they seek to replace the notion of the city as yoked to the world of planning and urban design by that of the image of a cultivated field. However, there may be good reason to believe that the world of habitats as seen through both these sets of images ultimately land up producing versions of each other. After all they are shaped by very similar notions of what constitutes patterns of ownership and propriety, order and organization. The cultivated field is also a grided, organized world. Yet the urban experience for a vast majority of people in the world today falls outside these patterns altogether. Millions of people live in spaces that qualify to be the very opposite of the systematic urban worlds that we have come to expect as the valid city. How do we account for ‘urban nature’ embodied in that experience?
We are not talking only about slums, favelas and shanties here. We are also thinking of some of the most developed, technologically advanced and futuristic cities in the world, such as Tokyo.
The Chinese Far West
Just spent 3 days in Rome to check out FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in several venues throughout the city.
In a time when most photo festivals focus on urbanity, chaos or sustainability, the theme chosen by FotoGrafia this year is very brave: "Seeing normality. Photography portrays daily life".
First stop was the Palazzo delle Esposizioni there were several shows by young photographers but one of the photo series was so striking (and so far away from what you and i would regard as "normality"), i spent the rest of my stay in the Italian capital obsessing about it. Chinese Wild West, a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel, follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in African lands.
As they explain: To quench its thirst for oil, its hunger for copper, uranium and wood, Beijing has sent out its state companies and its adventurous entrepreneurs to conquer Africa.
For the 500.000 Chinese who have emigrated to the 'dark continent' there is the promise of a 21st century Wild West. Some have struck gold and run large conglomerates that span whole regions of Africa, others are still selling their cheap goods on the burning hot roadsides of the poorest countries in the world.
For the Africans, the arrival of the Chinese is perhaps the most important event of the forty years of independence. The Chinese do not look like the former colonialists. They build roads, dams and hospitals and win over the people. They speak neither of democracy nor transparency and they win over the dictators.Woods and Michel conclude their presentation of the work with these words: These are rare images: Beijing wants to keep a low profile for its conquest. But though it remains largely unexposed these photographs portray a phenomenon, a new dimension of globalization, that threatens to leave the West behind.
Just spent 3 days in Rome to check out FotoGrafia, the 7th edition of international festival of photography which runs until May 25th in several venues throughout the city.
In a time when most photo festivals focus on urbanity, chaos or sustainability, the theme chosen by FotoGrafia this year is very brave: "Seeing normality. Photography portrays daily life".
First stop was the Palazzo delle Esposizioni there were several shows by young photographers but one of the photo series was so striking (and so far away from what you and i would regard as "normality"), i spent the rest of my stay in the Italian capital obsessing about it. Chinese Wild West, a collaboration between photographer Paolo Woods and journalist Serge Michel, follows China's industrial neo-colonialism in African lands.
As they explain: To quench its thirst for oil, its hunger for copper, uranium and wood, Beijing has sent out its state companies and its adventurous entrepreneurs to conquer Africa.
For the 500.000 Chinese who have emigrated to the 'dark continent' there is the promise of a 21st century Wild West. Some have struck gold and run large conglomerates that span whole regions of Africa, others are still selling their cheap goods on the burning hot roadsides of the poorest countries in the world.
For the Africans, the arrival of the Chinese is perhaps the most important event of the forty years of independence. The Chinese do not look like the former colonialists. They build roads, dams and hospitals and win over the people. They speak neither of democracy nor transparency and they win over the dictators.
Woods and Michel conclude their presentation of the work with these words: These are rare images: Beijing wants to keep a low profile for its conquest. But though it remains largely unexposed these photographs portray a phenomenon, a new dimension of globalization, that threatens to leave the West behind.
Puzzle of Bombings in Jaipur
The bombings that shook Jaipur and killed 80 innocents are not immediately legible as ordinary politics. Most previous such bombings (Bombay, Hyderabad) have been in areas that have important Muslim minorities, or have been connected to separatist movements such as in Assam. Some appear to have been the work of Muslim radicals and intended as revenge on the Bharatiya Janata Party for its ties to RSS goon squads that have engaged in pogroms against Muslims. But Jaipur in Rajasthan is heavily Hindu and is not politically symbolic. Its main claim to fame is as a tourist attraction.
I don't agree with the Indian analysts who suggest that the site of the attack is arbitrary, or that it has something to do with the new government in Pakistan, which is more favorable to India than the previous one. A general attempt to foment Hindu-Muslim tension may be part of it, but then why did the perpetrators not announce themselves?
Possible considerations are that unlike most of India's provinces now, Rajasthan is run by the BJP. So this attack could be a strike against that party. A bombing in Jaipur clearly is intended to hurt India's tourist economy. Since tourism revenues in Jaipur at the moment benefit the BJP, these horrific bombings could be intended to harm the provincial government.
Terrorists have their own awful logic, however, so other considerations may have played a role.
Originally from Informed Comment by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 14, 2008, 4:20AM
The bombings that shook Jaipur and killed 80 innocents are not immediately legible as ordinary politics. Most previous such bombings (Bombay, Hyderabad) have been in areas that have important Muslim minorities, or have been connected to separatist movements such as in Assam. Some appear to have been the work of Muslim radicals and intended as revenge on the Bharatiya Janata Party for its ties to RSS goon squads that have engaged in pogroms against Muslims. But Jaipur in Rajasthan is heavily Hindu and is not politically symbolic. Its main claim to fame is as a tourist attraction.
I don't agree with the Indian analysts who suggest that the site of the attack is arbitrary, or that it has something to do with the new government in Pakistan, which is more favorable to India than the previous one. A general attempt to foment Hindu-Muslim tension may be part of it, but then why did the perpetrators not announce themselves?
Possible considerations are that unlike most of India's provinces now, Rajasthan is run by the BJP. So this attack could be a strike against that party. A bombing in Jaipur clearly is intended to hurt India's tourist economy. Since tourism revenues in Jaipur at the moment benefit the BJP, these horrific bombings could be intended to harm the provincial government.
Terrorists have their own awful logic, however, so other considerations may have played a role.
Originally from Informed Comment by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 14, 2008, 4:20AM
Just Another British Torture Sanctuary?
[Image: An aerial photograph of Rawalpindi showing the interrogation centre. Photograph: Getty Images, via The Guardian.]
Well, it looks like we have another clandestine room to file away in the emerging architecture of the War on Terror’s pantheonic library of secret military spaces. A few days ago the Guardian reported that a secret interrogation center had been discovered in Pakistan, specifically in the Saddar district of Rawalpindi. The site, unsurprisingly, is “surrounded by high walls and watchtowers,” and “bristl(es) with surveillance cameras.” It is, however, notorious enough that so far local photographers have not dared to take any photos of it.
The site is run by the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) who has been accused of meddling in foreign affairs with Afghanistan through its own connections with terrorist groups there.
Interestingly enough, this site has come to light as a depot for British terrorism suspects, not Arab suspects, who allege they were tortured there after UK authorities had them arrested.
It’s been brewing in the British media for months, British terrorist suspects claiming they've been abused in this Pakistan detention facility while British military and other UK officials had previously interviewed them and merely stood by. Detainees who have since been released from this place claim that M15 agents (the UK’s national security service) “instigated the torture of British citizens or, at very least, turned a blind eye to their mistreatment.”
[Image: The London headquarters of MI5. Photograph: Frank Baron, via The Guardian.>]
So, which intelligence agency are we accusing of what, exactly?
Regarding the facility itself, one of the released suspects said this:
(He) “was one of several prisoners kept in an underground block of 10 small cells, each with a mattress and a pillow. The torture, he says, took place nearby in a carpeted room with bright overhead lights, a table, several chairs and a small wooden stool where prisoners were expected to sit. In one corner of the room was a camera. He says that sometimes he would be hooded and driven for 20 minutes to meet two MI5 officers; on other occasions they would question him in the room where he had been tortured.”
However, another equally curious and nefarious dimension to the cloaks of secrecy surrounding this site is how the British Foreign Office has responded to questions about their role in the interrogations taking place there, and how it's assumed that with the M15’s presence there they certainly must have known British citizens were being tortured.
Asked about this failure, the Foreign Office said it could not act for British citizens of joint British-Pakistani nationality, as the authorities in Islamabad regarded them as being only Pakistani.
Ali Dayan Hasan, the south Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: "I find it worrying that the British high commission has sought refuge behind the dual citizenship clause when it knows that the detainee's life may be in danger and that the detention is illegal under Pakistani, British and international law."
So, the Pakistani interrogation center, in conjunction with this dual nationality technicality, becomes a sanctuary for British authorities to deny accountability and to essentially shield themselves from any ethical responsibility of their own. It’s just totally fascinating to me how a given site could serve this dual purpose. On one hand, acting as a literal space of torture, while on the other as a kind of abstract political shelter for an insidious observant form of indirect participation in torture. I wonder, which came first: the facility, the M15's presence, and then the dual nationality card, or was this political shielding first determined and then used to open up a way for the UK's involvement in these arrests and interrogations?
Anyway, more on all of this here:
MI5 agents and torture abroad
MI5 accused of colluding in torture of terrorist suspects Originally from Subtopia by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 14, 2008, 4:25PM
[Image: An aerial photograph of Rawalpindi showing the interrogation centre. Photograph: Getty Images, via The Guardian.]
Well, it looks like we have another clandestine room to file away in the emerging architecture of the War on Terror’s pantheonic library of secret military spaces. A few days ago the Guardian reported that a secret interrogation center had been discovered in Pakistan, specifically in the Saddar district of Rawalpindi. The site, unsurprisingly, is “surrounded by high walls and watchtowers,” and “bristl(es) with surveillance cameras.” It is, however, notorious enough that so far local photographers have not dared to take any photos of it.
The site is run by the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) who has been accused of meddling in foreign affairs with Afghanistan through its own connections with terrorist groups there.
Interestingly enough, this site has come to light as a depot for British terrorism suspects, not Arab suspects, who allege they were tortured there after UK authorities had them arrested.
It’s been brewing in the British media for months, British terrorist suspects claiming they've been abused in this Pakistan detention facility while British military and other UK officials had previously interviewed them and merely stood by. Detainees who have since been released from this place claim that M15 agents (the UK’s national security service) “instigated the torture of British citizens or, at very least, turned a blind eye to their mistreatment.”
[Image: The London headquarters of MI5. Photograph: Frank Baron, via The Guardian.>]
So, which intelligence agency are we accusing of what, exactly?
Regarding the facility itself, one of the released suspects said this:
(He) “was one of several prisoners kept in an underground block of 10 small cells, each with a mattress and a pillow. The torture, he says, took place nearby in a carpeted room with bright overhead lights, a table, several chairs and a small wooden stool where prisoners were expected to sit. In one corner of the room was a camera. He says that sometimes he would be hooded and driven for 20 minutes to meet two MI5 officers; on other occasions they would question him in the room where he had been tortured.”However, another equally curious and nefarious dimension to the cloaks of secrecy surrounding this site is how the British Foreign Office has responded to questions about their role in the interrogations taking place there, and how it's assumed that with the M15’s presence there they certainly must have known British citizens were being tortured.
Asked about this failure, the Foreign Office said it could not act for British citizens of joint British-Pakistani nationality, as the authorities in Islamabad regarded them as being only Pakistani.So, the Pakistani interrogation center, in conjunction with this dual nationality technicality, becomes a sanctuary for British authorities to deny accountability and to essentially shield themselves from any ethical responsibility of their own. It’s just totally fascinating to me how a given site could serve this dual purpose. On one hand, acting as a literal space of torture, while on the other as a kind of abstract political shelter for an insidious observant form of indirect participation in torture. I wonder, which came first: the facility, the M15's presence, and then the dual nationality card, or was this political shielding first determined and then used to open up a way for the UK's involvement in these arrests and interrogations?
Ali Dayan Hasan, the south Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said: "I find it worrying that the British high commission has sought refuge behind the dual citizenship clause when it knows that the detainee's life may be in danger and that the detention is illegal under Pakistani, British and international law."
Anyway, more on all of this here:
MI5 agents and torture abroad
MI5 accused of colluding in torture of terrorist suspects
Originally from Subtopia by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 14, 2008, 4:25PM
Boullée in North Dakota
From the HABS/HAER collections in the Library of Congress comes these gorgeous photographic documentations of an anti-ballistic missile complex in North Dakota.
Several such sites were planned as part of the Safeguard Program, but only this was ever completed. And after being in operations for just 4 months, it was deactivated.
In the years since, countless drunken youths and their spray paints have made pilgrimages to these Pharaonic ruins of the U.S. Army. No doubt one of them must have wondered whether if it was simply a matter of coincidence that this pyramid, whose walls he was pissing on, resembles the unfinished pyramid in the the Great Seal of the United States, its once radar equipment being the Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye.
Or if the military counts among its ranks a cabal of Freemasons constantly and surreptitiously finding ways to channel their aesthetic inclinations, in the face of institutionalized prohibition against self-expression and individuality. Sculpted berms here, geometrically-patterned rows of exhaust stacks there, mastaba-shaped radar facility right over there, chalked footpaths everywhere.
The U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a form of Land Art.
One of his companions, a blogger of the built environment, will report his inebriated musings, speculating further that those anonymous soldier-bureaucrat-architects must have been great admirers of the unbuilt works of Étienne-Louis Boullée. As an homage, they designed the radar building in the form of the master's pyramidal cenotaphs.
Even their monument-complex are pierced with holes, this blogger will blog, although they are not cosmically aligned. You will not see stars; they do not form constellations. Rather, they are aligned to millions of city dwellers halfway around the world, under surveillance, targeted for total erasure.
From the HABS/HAER collections in the Library of Congress comes these gorgeous photographic documentations of an anti-ballistic missile complex in North Dakota.
Several such sites were planned as part of the Safeguard Program, but only this was ever completed. And after being in operations for just 4 months, it was deactivated.
In the years since, countless drunken youths and their spray paints have made pilgrimages to these Pharaonic ruins of the U.S. Army. No doubt one of them must have wondered whether if it was simply a matter of coincidence that this pyramid, whose walls he was pissing on, resembles the unfinished pyramid in the the Great Seal of the United States, its once radar equipment being the Eye of Providence, the all-seeing eye.
Or if the military counts among its ranks a cabal of Freemasons constantly and surreptitiously finding ways to channel their aesthetic inclinations, in the face of institutionalized prohibition against self-expression and individuality. Sculpted berms here, geometrically-patterned rows of exhaust stacks there, mastaba-shaped radar facility right over there, chalked footpaths everywhere.
The U.S. anti-ballistic landscape as a form of Land Art.
One of his companions, a blogger of the built environment, will report his inebriated musings, speculating further that those anonymous soldier-bureaucrat-architects must have been great admirers of the unbuilt works of Étienne-Louis Boullée. As an homage, they designed the radar building in the form of the master's pyramidal cenotaphs.
Even their monument-complex are pierced with holes, this blogger will blog, although they are not cosmically aligned. You will not see stars; they do not form constellations. Rather, they are aligned to millions of city dwellers halfway around the world, under surveillance, targeted for total erasure.
where truces and cease fires grow on trees…
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
While the "inner German border” that once divided East and West Germany decades ago, stretching 879 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic, was a tangled jungle of barbed wire, landmines, booby traps and soldier patrols, it was also, much like the Korean DMZ, a kind of sanctuary for considerable wildlife.
When the Berlin Wall fell German environmentalists fought to protect the long line of no-man’s-land as a Green Belt, connecting it with Europe’s larger green belt that has followed the path of the Iron Curtain from the north of Finland south to the Adriatic Sea.
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
Up until now the German Green Belt has had very little legal protection, and while it still has a long ways to go, Spiegel reports that the groundwork for a new agreement between the federal Government and the local German states which directly assume responsibility for the Green Belt have reached some form of legal outlines for its protection. Currently, only a third of the natural corridor is designated a nature conservation area, but that could soon be increased. The Green Belt itself though is of great interest.
The no-man's-land that emerged, ranging from 60 to 200 meters wide, provided the ideal conditions for the flourishing of flora and fauna. Up to 600 endangered species, including the black stork and the lady's slipper orchid, thrived in this unusual terrain.
What has made this green corridor remarkable is the interlocking of over 100 types of biotopes, including forests, fens and meadows. Hubert Weiger, president of BUND, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday that "in other places species become extinct because their habitats shrink to islands due urban sprawl." According to Geidezis this is unique in Central Europe. "You don't find these connecting biotopes in Europe any more. Most have been split up, preventing animals from traveling from place to place."
I will leave you to go read about the details of the legal proceedings that aim to protect the Green Belt. I am more curious about what perhaps it could symbolize in a heightened era of protracted border security.
What if somehow in a great show of geopolitical magic all of the border fences, boundary walls and separation barriers that callous the world’s neighborly skin suddenly vanished? Miles of scrappy national security architecture just dissolved in a great disappearing act leaving only trails of dirt behind on its barren stage. And then, over the course of a few years, filling in these tracts of severed farms and semi-conquered wetlands, of annexed soils and halved rural pasturtopias, new post-conflict species of borderzone flora and fauna colored in the rugged footprints with epic flourishes of greenery.
Forgive me for sounding ridiculously hippie dippie here, but imagine the borders of the future bound in bloom instead of barricade; crossings blended by mossy sutures rather than surgical fences and political non-futures.
Suppose these old curvilinear scars of border space could be remade into the world’s longest and narrowest public parks project. Bi-national teams of landscape architects and horticulturalists are organized from both sides of all the old fences. Each region designs its own celestial garden corridor -- a strip garden in a long line of international strip gardens -- that turns the remnant jetties of border conflict into opulent open air greenhouses shared and protected by joint nations. Local cross-border communities would maintain them. Dignitaries from all over the world would hail them as these long lush paths to political healing, while travelers and ecologists would wander down the rolling green carpets siphoning unsmelled fragrances through their nostrils and basking in the Eden like experience of post-militarized botanical reverie. The border grown into the geography of a dispersed global ecological refuge. Stitching nations together with enclaves of freshly oxygenated public space these elongated nature preserves would help to spawn innovative conservation policy, allow new species to emerge, and even old ones to re-emerge. Call them peace parks, green belts, border gardens, whatever, Subtopia will surely be there enjoying an eternal picnic under those canopies where truces and cease fires grow on trees. Originally from Subtopia by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 3:13PM
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
While the "inner German border” that once divided East and West Germany decades ago, stretching 879 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Czech Republic, was a tangled jungle of barbed wire, landmines, booby traps and soldier patrols, it was also, much like the Korean DMZ, a kind of sanctuary for considerable wildlife.
When the Berlin Wall fell German environmentalists fought to protect the long line of no-man’s-land as a Green Belt, connecting it with Europe’s larger green belt that has followed the path of the Iron Curtain from the north of Finland south to the Adriatic Sea.
[Image: Former 'Inner German Border' Provides Haven for Wildlife, Spiegel, May 13, 2008.]
Up until now the German Green Belt has had very little legal protection, and while it still has a long ways to go, Spiegel reports that the groundwork for a new agreement between the federal Government and the local German states which directly assume responsibility for the Green Belt have reached some form of legal outlines for its protection. Currently, only a third of the natural corridor is designated a nature conservation area, but that could soon be increased. The Green Belt itself though is of great interest.
The no-man's-land that emerged, ranging from 60 to 200 meters wide, provided the ideal conditions for the flourishing of flora and fauna. Up to 600 endangered species, including the black stork and the lady's slipper orchid, thrived in this unusual terrain.
What has made this green corridor remarkable is the interlocking of over 100 types of biotopes, including forests, fens and meadows. Hubert Weiger, president of BUND, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Tuesday that "in other places species become extinct because their habitats shrink to islands due urban sprawl." According to Geidezis this is unique in Central Europe. "You don't find these connecting biotopes in Europe any more. Most have been split up, preventing animals from traveling from place to place."
I will leave you to go read about the details of the legal proceedings that aim to protect the Green Belt. I am more curious about what perhaps it could symbolize in a heightened era of protracted border security.
What if somehow in a great show of geopolitical magic all of the border fences, boundary walls and separation barriers that callous the world’s neighborly skin suddenly vanished? Miles of scrappy national security architecture just dissolved in a great disappearing act leaving only trails of dirt behind on its barren stage. And then, over the course of a few years, filling in these tracts of severed farms and semi-conquered wetlands, of annexed soils and halved rural pasturtopias, new post-conflict species of borderzone flora and fauna colored in the rugged footprints with epic flourishes of greenery.
Forgive me for sounding ridiculously hippie dippie here, but imagine the borders of the future bound in bloom instead of barricade; crossings blended by mossy sutures rather than surgical fences and political non-futures.
Suppose these old curvilinear scars of border space could be remade into the world’s longest and narrowest public parks project. Bi-national teams of landscape architects and horticulturalists are organized from both sides of all the old fences. Each region designs its own celestial garden corridor -- a strip garden in a long line of international strip gardens -- that turns the remnant jetties of border conflict into opulent open air greenhouses shared and protected by joint nations. Local cross-border communities would maintain them. Dignitaries from all over the world would hail them as these long lush paths to political healing, while travelers and ecologists would wander down the rolling green carpets siphoning unsmelled fragrances through their nostrils and basking in the Eden like experience of post-militarized botanical reverie. The border grown into the geography of a dispersed global ecological refuge. Stitching nations together with enclaves of freshly oxygenated public space these elongated nature preserves would help to spawn innovative conservation policy, allow new species to emerge, and even old ones to re-emerge. Call them peace parks, green belts, border gardens, whatever, Subtopia will surely be there enjoying an eternal picnic under those canopies where truces and cease fires grow on trees.
Originally from Subtopia by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 3:13PM
Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible
A lecture by Trevor Paglen
Friday, May 23rd
8pm
Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen explores the network of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people that military
and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Over the course of his talk, Paglen will lead us from “non-existent” Air Force and CIA
installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home.
Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give
rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.
They’ve also given rise to an incredible catalog of black-ops iron-on membership patches that have to be seen to be believed. The visual language of patches and symbols from black projects recalls other symbolic systems that have surprisingly long traditions. For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that, which by definition, cannot or must not be represented. Sometimes the answer is in repurposed religious symbology; sometimes it’s taking a cue from the Insane Clown Posse.
FREE!
Originally from machine project by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 12:34PM
A lecture by Trevor Paglen
Friday, May 23rd
8pm
Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen explores the network of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people that military
and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Over the course of his talk, Paglen will lead us from “non-existent” Air Force and CIA
installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home.
Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give
rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.
They’ve also given rise to an incredible catalog of black-ops iron-on membership patches that have to be seen to be believed. The visual language of patches and symbols from black projects recalls other symbolic systems that have surprisingly long traditions. For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that, which by definition, cannot or must not be represented. Sometimes the answer is in repurposed religious symbology; sometimes it’s taking a cue from the Insane Clown Posse.
FREE!
Originally from machine project by reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 12:34PM
Robert Rauschenberg, RIP
Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The artist at his home and studio in Captiva Island, Fla. in 2005.
via NYTimes:
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.
Mr. Rauschenberg's work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," forinstance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. "Monogram" was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a paintedpanel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint,as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons ofpostwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker,choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years,even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that anartist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimesreconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornelland others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting andsculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking,sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture andtechnology, technology and performance art - not to mention between artand life.
Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The artist at his home and studio in Captiva Island, Fla. in 2005.
via NYTimes:
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 14, 2008Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.
Mr. Rauschenberg's work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," forinstance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. "Monogram" was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a paintedpanel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint,as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons ofpostwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker,choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years,even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that anartist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimesreconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornelland others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting andsculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking,sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture andtechnology, technology and performance art - not to mention between artand life.
Bordering on Debord’s Board Game (or, Professor Accused of Infringing Copyright of Man Who Opposed Copyright)
KRIEGSPIEL
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War"
Produced for computer by RSG
Screen shot courtesy of m.river, flickr.com
via WaterCoolerGames:
Wark on Debord
April 15, 2008 - by Ian Bogost
Following our coverage of the legal flap around Alex Galloway's digital adaptation of Guy Debord's Game of War, McKenzie Wark (author of the excellent book Gamer Theory) has published a short, thoughtful essay on Debord's original. The piece is forthcoming in Wark's new book project, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972.
via post.thing.net and interactivist info exchange, 04/23/2008:
{additional links courtesy of newsgrist}
Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright
What ever happened to the Art of Giving?
Dean Robert Storr, explores the consequences of when patrons wrestle power from museum curators and directors. What does such a move mean for the public?In the end Storr thinks Eli Broad should have just gone traditional. However, the public not LACMA is the real looser.Frieze Magazine Originally from Archinect.com Feed, ReBlogged by jwinter on May 13, 2008 at 09:40 AM
Originally from Eyebeam reBlog reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 7:40AM
KRIEGSPIEL
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War"
Produced for computer by RSG
Screen shot courtesy of m.river, flickr.com
via WaterCoolerGames:
Wark on Debord
April 15, 2008 - by Ian BogostFollowing our coverage of the legal flap around Alex Galloway's digital adaptation of Guy Debord's Game of War, McKenzie Wark (author of the excellent book Gamer Theory) has published a short, thoughtful essay on Debord's original. The piece is forthcoming in Wark's new book project, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972.
via post.thing.net and interactivist info exchange, 04/23/2008:
{additional links courtesy of newsgrist}
Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright
What ever happened to the Art of Giving?
Dean Robert Storr, explores the consequences of when patrons wrestle power from museum curators and directors. What does such a move mean for the public?In the end Storr thinks Eli Broad should have just gone traditional. However, the public not LACMA is the real looser.Frieze Magazine Originally from Archinect.com Feed, ReBlogged by jwinter on May 13, 2008 at 09:40 AM
Originally from Eyebeam reBlog reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 7:40AM
Originally from Archinect.com Feed, ReBlogged by jwinter on May 13, 2008 at 09:40 AM
Originally from Eyebeam reBlog reBlogged by caleb waldorf on May 13, 2008, 7:40AM
