RafaelFajardo
July 2015
Paper-thin
printed solar cells could provide power for 1.3 billion people ~ inhabitat.com
Exclusive: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter Since Ferguson
Exclusive: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter Since Ferguson
So they have time to track activists who speak out against injustices, but apparently don’t have time to take care of said injustices.
Reminder: Activism is not a crime. Killing people is.Reminder they did this in the 60 s as well
Cointelpro was only released because of brave activists, more specifically a brave woman stole the documents in the FBI headquarters. Keeping that in mind, it was never meant to get out and discovered. It also never ended.
The OpenBuilds Team is proud to announce the release of it’s official parts library resource 🙂
would Gatorjaw extruded aluminum also make it?
To Game Deliberately
“In Walden, Fullerton and her team are creating an environment starkly different from the fantasy worlds we ordinarily associate with games. I have to recalibrate my expectations even to take in this demo: There’s no opening disaster, no adrenaline rush, no emergencies, and no explosions. You can’t annihilate your enemies, because there aren’t any.”
How Ex Machina Abuses Women of Color and Nobody Cares Cause It’s Smart
How Ex Machina Abuses Women of Color and Nobody Cares Cause It’s Smart
THINKMEXICAN
Before Latino and Hispanic, there was Mestizo. All created by colonizers to have us hate ourselves. This essay by Native American scholar Jack Forbes is still relevant several decades after it was first published. It is a must read for any Mexican seeking to understand how identity labels are constructed, and how they are able to keep many of us mentally enslaved hundreds of years after they were created. Let’s decolonize.
Maya Ball Game Kept Alive by National Tournament
A team from the Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, won Mexico’s first national Maya ball game tournament held this past week at the Kukulcan Sports Complex in Mérida, Yucatán. They will be representing Mexico against teams from Belize and Guatemala at the first international tournament of “Pok Ta Pok” in September.
An estimated 500 Mexicans practice the Maya ball game. A close variation named “Ulama” is popular in the Northern state of Sinaloa, where many traveled from to participate in last week’s tournament.
BB: Does maker culture, and its mass-market mirror of “artisanal” production, have any shared roots with the SI’s emphasis on producing highly-designed, limited-run free journals and books?
MW: Yes and no. One wouldn’t want to be part of this whole disruptive technology language, which is pure California ideology [Ed. – “The Californian Ideology” was a 1995 essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron exploring the “counter-culture libertarianism” at work in Silicon Valley technoculture]. One would not want to get too close to the petit bourgeois Brooklynization of everything, the organic beard oil for 20 dollars. But, I think, not just Marxists, but a lot of people with pretensions to critical theory got very remote from practices of making, and to not understand the production technologies of our time is an enormous oversight. To at least know how to make one thing is an extremely helpful way of understanding what production is, what labor is. So with the launch of The Spectacle of Disintegration, I’m doing limited edition Guy Debord action figures that are 3D printed, and we’re gonna release the file to print your own for free. There is something that is really interesting about 3D printing, but it’s a proprietary technology. On the one hand, it enables a certain kind of détournement, but on the other hand is already being recuperated before it’s even on the market. I actually walked past MakerBot on my way here. Just down on Houston, there’s a little showroom down there, and it kind of reminds me of the Apple 2 before the Mac. It’s at that stage. So yeah I really recommend that one do what Debord did in that sense. He learned how to produce journals. He was really good at it. He was a good editor and production manager. The twelve issues of the Internationale Situationniste are really lovely handmade objects.
Rhizome | A Cavalier History of Situationism: An Interview with McKenzie Wark
(hat tip to notational )
Geert Lovink: Where in your biography would you trace the origins of speculative thought?
Kodwo Eshun: One of the key inputs is McLuhan. There is an interview he gave in 1968 called “Hot and Cool”. Here I realized that McLuhan had anticipated my project. He was saying that the extraction of concepts from any field demands that these concepts be used as probes in order to get into a possibility space. Not to contextualize and historisize, tracing the archeology of concepts, where they come from, which is what academics are trained to do. Often it helps if the concept is quite empty. McLuhan was really fascinated by this.
It works well with science fiction, specifically J.G. Ballard. Science fiction as theory on fast forward. In Ballard’s theory fiction, especially his “Atrocity Exhibition” in 1970, and “Myths of the Near Future”, his trilogy “Crash”, “Concrete Islands” and “High Rise” and in lots of his essays you have a particular obsessive figure who is trying to work out and stage a particular project: WW III, or the assassination of JFK and Malcolm X all over again. In order to do that they are forced to go out and construct a theory kit. Take for example a painting of Max Ernst, which will then have an aggressively speculative meaning and function, which will then lead you into a new space time. On the other side you have the scientist, who using speculative analysis to understand the anti-hero’s speculative projects. Here we have two levels of speculation, embedded inside fiction. The other thing is that Ballard is doing a science fiction of the next minutes. He drops away the Star Wars space opera, with its galactic and robotic elements. What you are left with is a science fiction of nine minutes from now, the technology of plastics, the pill. He is drawing a zodiac of the present.
We have the following: speculative theory embedded in science fiction, science fiction re-interpreted as an analysis of the ongoing present. Add that to McLuhan’s idea of extracting concepts and using them as probes to get to somewhere new. Once I had found these aspects I became more conscious in applying them to sonic concepts which composers and musicians would adopt. Often they would not make programmatic statements. The concepts would rather be buried in track titles or within an album cover. You would be able to see it, but they would be compressed, abbreviated, and I wanted to unstuff them.
(hat tip to notational )
