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MURKETING

posted by PML @ 9:44 AM 0 comments

A Sousveillance Pedestrian on the Oakland B.A.R.T. (Bay Area Rapid Transit): A Discussion on Forums Created by Sousveillors

Sousveillance is described in an article by Steve Mann, who coined the term, as an inverse to surveillance. Mann quotes it as, “a means to balance the increasing (and increasingly one-sided) surveillance.” The etymology of this term is described in Wikipedia as this;

"Sousveillance" stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye-in-the-sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the camera or other means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings), or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).

This clash between surveillance and sousveillance appears in the media daily as citizens have felt the right and need to document their lives. With technological advances in digital cameras and cell phones with video capabilities, the pedestrian can capture any event within seconds thereby testing the limitations of surveillance.

The importance of the pedestrian sousveillor is very important as a tool for critiques on surveillance. One focus of critique is in the role of law enforcement and of whom they are protecting. This is a question that stems from the role of the establishment and how much political control it characterizes. Do the police subscribe to methods in which law enforcement is used to create a vision of political control that is not protecting the rights of the people? Also, have such methods of political control been mediated by other factors such as media? It is true that rumors of police destroying video evidence during protests and lying under oath have taken place. It is also true that people were specifically hired to take footage of actions in their favor. How deep can the law go to uphold a vision of control?

On New Years day of 2009, in Oakland, California, the fatal shooting of an unarmed man, Oscar Grant, was seen through the eyes of many people. The unfortunate event hit the internet immediately and soon became the outrage of many people. Some responded angrily as riots broke out all over the Oakland area. Dialogues of mistaken procedure and murder coursed through the transit system for weeks. But, this would not have been such a heavy topic for conversation without the key participation of a pedestrian onlooker. The brutality of the footage shows how a critical moment becomes so when many variables are not in control. In a moment a shot is fired, followed by the police officer’s moment of confusion, and then everyone else’s hysteria.

Unfortunately, accidents happen all the time. This wasn’t even the first BART shooting.

On Nov. 15, 1992, BART officer Fred Crabtree shot and killed Jerrold Hall in the back of the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. Hall and another Black male friend were standing at a bus stop near a BART entrance in Hayward, and were approached because they fit the description of two men accused of robbery. BART cleared the officer, but in 1996, he committed suicide by hanging. (Muhammad, Sacramento Observer [02/05/09]).

The above event poses an important question: Is video sousveillance necessary to expose a corruption that would have taken place? Without this major piece of evidence police officer Johannes Mesherle could have been acquitted of all charges. The cycle of cover-ups may have already been spinning before the department realized that few thousands had already seen and analyzed the footage. Some of them already noticed that Mesherle had a moment of confusion after he fatally shot Oscar Grant.

It is important to understand that cases like these are not necessarily right or wrong. The officer who shot Grant is only the first to come. The bigger picture that comes from this situation is that something was interrupted. The outcome of the tragedy may have gone in a different route. This is speculative, but from previously mentioned circumstances of Officer Fred Crabtree and Jerrold Hall, it is quite possible. The actual outcome was the open debate as to whether police murder is the same as any other murder. And this forum was finally opened up to a bigger population by the invention of modern digital recording devices, i.e. cell phones and digital cameras.

Now this is a small example of many of these debates arising all over the world. We have all heard or seen the photos from Abu Ghirab and the prisoners. Although the images captured are somewhat horrifying to watch, sousveillance and the participation of commoners to act is a necessary and democratic way of opening forums and debates questioning society’s needs of repair. It is a useful way for becoming more democratic about the ways in which we understand situations and take closer looks at institutions that govern our perspectives and visions. It is nice to say, I heard an interesting debate today on public transit. People seemed so fired up about whether a police officer had mistakenly pulled the wrong weapon to incapacitate a man. The discussion led to the debate of whether police as humanity’s enforcement should be held accountable for accidental murder. More and more people joined in. Overall much better than watching individuals stare off into space, avoiding eye contact while their soul melts away into the dreary hum-drum of their life.

Project Description

Sousveillance Pedestrian Camera-Phone and Police Issue Taser/Glock Cut-outs is my answer to a situation that happened on New Years Day of 2009, where a man was unnecessarily shot. It used as a mockery of the conduct of aggressive police tactics and to symbolize an event through iconery. Each cut-out represent an act and weapon used by both sides of this picture: one, a symbol of justice and a debateable force of control, and two, a democratizing symbol of an oppositional sousveillor.

These tools are free to print and cutout if desired and is hoped to be available in more than one place. I hope it is not too heavy handed. Thanks.

posted by Simon @ 9:30 PM 0 comments

When tragedy strikes. Fruitvale BART shooting of unarmed man caught on video.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=oakland+shooting+cop&oe=UTF-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv&ei=s-7bSfTlM5eyMaXYnOEN&oi=property_suggestions&resnum=0&ct=property-revision&cd=1#

posted by Simon @ 8:15 PM 0 comments

Labels: Sousveillance Pedestrian Camera-Phone and Police Taser/Glock

posted by Simon @ 8:01 PM 0 comments

David Korten "The Great Turning" video mix

posted by Elliot @ 12:18 AM 0 comments

Donna Harraway

Hey everyone, I know this probably doesn’t do much good now, but here is my Donna Harraway Precies

In this beautiful am amazing essay Donna Harraway expands many of her other most famous concepts, especially those mobilized by the cyborg and on the proliferation of hybrids.

She begins this with a discussion of “nature”`stating that it is a “commonplace and a powerfully discursive construction.” Harraway is attempting to work through a model and understanding of nature (and really existence, especially embodiment,) which is not caught in the unproductive crosshairs of Modernist or postmodernism, arguing (after Latour,) that we have “never been modern.”

She movingly describes bodies as material semiotic generative nodes” which materialize in social interaction among humans and non-humans, including machines and other instruments.

She introduces, and later in the article, fleshes out a model based on the human-immune system, writing: “So while the late-twentieth century immune system, for example, is a construct of an elaborate apparatus of bodily production, neither the immune system nor any other of biology’s world-changing bodies-like viruses or an ecosystem – is a ghostly fantasy.

Movingly, Harraway discusses the corporeality of theory, that it is necessarily material, bodily, and literal.

Using a semiotic grid of A. Real Space: Earth; B. Out Space: The Extraterrestrial; Not B. Inner Space: The Biomedical Body; and Not A. Virtual Space: SF, Harraway’s essay weaves through close readings of technological advertisements, t-shirt logos, and space chimp narratives to flesh out her thesis on nature, artificiality, embodiment and technology.

Whether it is a read contrasting the relationship of fetuses to mother’s bodies to Amazonian inhabitants to the Amazon jungle (who is speaking thus?) and the assumptions from which such arguments are made or an unpacking of the misogynist- racist-imperialist under girding of a photograph of Jane Goodall holding hands with a monkey (the chimp touches her, anointing her as science to speak for it, nature, wrapped un in complex (and very visible) histories of miscegenation.)

One of the most lovely stretches (beside its entirety) is Harraway’s personal tale about the intervention and controversy of Surrogate Other’s, their infiltration into a government testing site (using a floral-print polyester snake-worm with “lovely dragon eyes,”) and the unpacking of the semantics, and images of their name and shirts (describing the world as an amniotic sac and mother simultaneously, the kind of descriptive “monstrous” hybrids, the spaces of the margins, that Harraway works.

Finally at the end emerges her discussion of the cyborg reading in the Lynn Randolph painting Cyborg (1989) “the full circle of the noisey semiotic square, finding it a rainbow of political semiology for wily transnational techno science studies as cultural studies.”

I am interested an always very moved at her reads of visual imagery, like ads, and the extreme importance it carries for her theoretically and politically, what, as cultural produces do we make of her reads and its implications for our practice.

posted by Jarrett @ 9:01 AM 0 comments

Donna Harraway

Hey everyone, I know this probably doesn’t do much good now, but here is my Donna Harraway Precies

In this beautiful am amazing essay Donna Harraway expands many of her other most famous concepts, especially those mobilized by the cyborg and on the proliferation of hybrids.

She begins this with a discussion of “nature”`stating that it is a “commonplace and a powerfully discursive construction.” Harraway is attempting to work through a model and understanding of nature (and really existence, especially embodiment,) which is not caught in the unproductive crosshairs of Modernist or postmodernism, arguing (after Latour,) that we have “never been modern.”

She movingly describes bodies as material semiotic generative nodes” which materialize in social interaction among humans and non-humans, including machines and other instruments.

She introduces, and later in the article, fleshes out a model based on the human-immune system, writing: “So while the late-twentieth century immune system, for example, is a construct of an elaborate apparatus of bodily production, neither the immune system nor any other of biology’s world-changing bodies-like viruses or an ecosystem – is a ghostly fantasy.

Movingly, Harraway discusses the corporeality of theory, that it is necessarily material, bodily, and literal.

Using a semiotic grid of A. Real Space: Earth; B. Out Space: The Extraterrestrial; Not B. Inner Space: The Biomedical Body; and Not A. Virtual Space: SF, Harraway’s essay weaves through close readings of technological advertisements, t-shirt logos, and space chimp narratives to flesh out her thesis on nature, artificiality, embodiment and technology.

Whether it is a read contrasting the relationship of fetuses to mother’s bodies to Amazonian inhabitants to the Amazon jungle (who is speaking thus?) and the assumptions from which such arguments are made or an unpacking of the misogynist- racist-imperialist under girding of a photograph of Jane Goodall holding hands with a monkey (the chimp touches her, anointing her as science to speak for it, nature, wrapped un in complex (and very visible) histories of miscegenation.)

One of the most lovely stretches (beside its entirety) is Harraway’s personal tale about the intervention and controversy of Surrogate Other’s, their infiltration into a government testing site (using a floral-print polyester snake-worm with “lovely dragon eyes,”) and the unpacking of the semantics, and images of their name and shirts (describing the world as an amniotic sac and mother simultaneously, the kind of descriptive “monstrous” hybrids, the spaces of the margins, that Harraway works.

Finally at the end emerges her discussion of the cyborg reading in the Lynn Randolph painting Cyborg (1989) “the full circle of the noisey semiotic square, finding it a rainbow of political semiology for wily transnational techno science studies as cultural studies.”

I am interested an always very moved at her reads of visual imagery, like ads, and the extreme importance it carries for her theoretically and politically, what, as cultural produces do we make of her reads and its implications for our practice.

posted by Jarrett @ 9:01 AM 0 comments

CLIPART COMICS

Final Project by Peter Max Lawrence
http://petermaxlawrence.com/PWP/CLIPARTCOMICS/01/0101_00.html

posted by PML @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Locative media and the city

Ran across this, and it peaked my interest.

"...locative and mobile media and how they relate to urban culture and questions of identity...“MySpace urbanism” – the condition of cities saturated with media networks, where physical space is intersected with layers of personalised, spatial orientation."

Reminds me of the Debord, the Situationists and their exploration of psychogeographies.

posted by Ian @ 10:38 PM 0 comments

Final Project!!!!

Hi Everybody!! For my final project I did some illustrations for "Maneki Neko", by Bruce Sterling...Also, at the bottom is an advertisement of my take on the Pokkecon mentioned in the story.....Please Enjoy!! Good luck with finals everybody!

posted by Kimmy @ 7:01 PM 0 comments

My site BAMTRON.COM

Recently I have been really interested in HTML or the Internet as a tool and medium. I have some issues with using the web as a space to show one's work but still see the practicality or inescapable accessibility. The artist websites I have seen use it like a business card, usually really cut and dry information with strict parameters. What you don't see a lot is artists approaching it from the another angle and treating it like they would their work. Seems simple enough but it was really hard for me to throw out my impulses to make my site "readable" and "understandable." I feel that this attempt is a step in the right direction because it's a compromise between conveying information effectively while still keeping my conceptual ideas in tact.

Please check it out, feedback appreciated:

www.bamtron.com

posted by Brittany @ 3:49 PM 0 comments

Garfield minus Garfield

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

posted by PML @ 1:34 PM 0 comments

For my presentation

Good Evening everyone.
On Thursday we will be participating in the show Let's Paint TV with artist John Kilduff! A live webcast from www.stickam.com
We will be tuning into his show at 11 or as close to that time as we can.
Check out his website!
http://letspainttv.com/

Here's a cool video of John in action!
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/4c8244ff76/mr-lets-paint-get-a-pie-s-in-his-face-from-letspainttv

posted by Jenni Eye @ 7:30 PM 0 comments

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy

Clay Shirky posted on Boing Boing, an article by James Grimmelmann entitled Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy. Thought someone might be interested.

posted by Ian @ 11:18 AM 0 comments