The Dictionary of War poses a fundamental question: how to struggle in the face of a so-called “state of exception” that always becomes a rule.
Started in 2006, eight editions have since been organized in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz, Berlin, Gwangju, Bolzano, Taipei, and Novi Sad, featuring 125+ concepts presented by a wide range of activists, architects, artists, composers, choreographers, dancers, filmmakers, generals, journalists, philosophers, scientists, theorists from across the globe.
Video of each concept presentation is available online in streaming or downloadable formats.
The Dictionary is a collaborative platform for creating concepts on the topic of war. The aim is to introduce a series of concepts that either play an important role in the contemporary discourse of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created. Its processes make the creation or revaluation of concepts transparent – more or less, open – in which we can and need to intervene. At the same time, the aim is to develop models that redefine the creation of concepts on the basis not of interdisciplinary but rather undisciplined, not co-operative but rather collaborative processes.
During the week of May 11-16, part of Boston’s Financial District will become a public soil lab and work area, as a crew assembled by Gina Badger works to create the Little Dig, a temporary non-monetary economy based on dirt.
Gina, with Shovel
As it foregrounds questions about waste, resources, and the creation of value, the Little Dig is appropriately set in the shadow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and atop the city’s infamous highway megaproject to which the work’s title refers, the Big Dig.
This is the first in a series of projects by Badger that take the actions of gardening as strategic points of departure in order to develop a new vocabulary of urban intervention.
The Little Dig will be accompanied by a reading room at the Boston Centre for the Arts’ Mills Gallery, as a part of the MIT Visual Arts Program exhibition And Things of That Nature. The reading room will consist of 50 volumes and an annotated bibliography that extend and are extended by the performance of The Little Dig.
Interested in participating? Leave a note in the comment section, and we’ll get in touch!
Nine experimental works and activist projects of Anne Elizabeth Moore will be on show at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book & Paper Arts, beginning June 19th. The retrospective, Dismantling the Corporate State, and Other Amusements, presents Anne’s work from as early as 1993, including:
The Catalog of This Exhibition (2007)
Radical Education Roadshow: How to Make This Very Zine (2004-2009)
The Unlympics (2009)
Operation: Pocket Full of Wishes (2004)
New Girl Law (2008, 2009)
Anne Zine (1993-2004)
Foundation for Freedom (2008)
Additionally, Pie Off (2009), will be presented at the opening reception on June 19 from 6:00-9:00PM:
Pie Off is an Irregular Semi-Annual Competitive Pie-Baking Competition held in the United States of America, devoted to exploring the boundaries of not only good taste, but also the boundaries of what constitutes competition, how decisions are made in groups, and what the limits of consumption are for even those individuals who claim to love pie more than anything else in the world. Each competition is themed differently and was devoted to the exploration of a different judging rubric, including: popular vote, Survivor-style elimination, panel of experts, celebrity vote, US Election-style, and autocratic. Pie will be provided.
The Anne Elizabeth Moore Award for Excellence in Awesomeness will be presented at the closing event, Friday, August 21 at 6:30PM.
Poster Detail from Hornsey College Occupation, 1968
Stemming from observations that the society of control is less interested in past expressions of power than in actually creating worlds, the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) is embarking on a three year research project to investigate the relationship between art production and knowledge production in the context of the transformations and crises of contemporary capitalism.
Creativity becomes an ambivalent term here, “creating worlds” meaning a modulating procedure in cognitive capitalism and societies of control, but also an emerging political dimension of creativity as political imagination and invention of new lines of flight, new struggles, new worlds.
Titled Creating Worlds, this tripartite effort will involve feminist and post-colonial critiques of cognitive capitalism, emphasizing not only the “immaterialization, informatization and acceleration of communication” that accompanies the treatment of knoweldge production as capital’s raw material, but also the simultaneous and parallel shift of “traditional industrial and manual labor to the dependent peripheries of the [so-called] Second and Third World.”
Further consideration will be paid to aging factories of knowledge production – the university in particular – with an eye toward recognizing different scales of transformation and struggle in the knowledge factory, particularly self-organized and alternative
Finally, the researchers will investigate the role of art in producing knowledge, particularly as it relates to theory and its implementation in policy, as well as other instances where art serves as a catlyst for social transformation.
Last Thursday at noon, forty revelers invaded Barcelona’s unemployment office. Members of the Spanish art collective En Medio brought levity to the typically frustrated and forlorn faces of those waiting in line, the victims of capitalism’s latest crisis.
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