Mute Vol 2 #8 features Stewart Martin on aesthetic education in post-Fordism, a prizewinning essay on music and code by Simon Yuill (Vilém Flusser theory award, Transmediale 2008), comic-strip satire from Plastique Fantastique, Tom Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev on carcino-regen in St Petersburg, and by Benedict Seymour on art-sport implosion and the 2012 Olympics. Plus hi-saccharine, zero % relational cover art from John Russell. Miaow!
Submitted by mute on Thursday, 3 July, 2008 - 14:20
Mihalis Mentinis
Since the 2006 Oaxaca revolt state repression in Mexico has contributed to popular feeling that peaceful protest has failed. Today, the country is on the threshold of a cycle of armed anti-capitalist struggle, argues Mihalis Mentinis
Submitted by anthony on Wednesday, 2 July, 2008 - 15:14
Richard Pithouse
The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club
Submitted by admin on Thursday, 26 June, 2008 - 12:20
Ana Balona de Oliveira
Pedro Costa's films belie both the cinematic exploitation of suffering and the documentary urge to record truth and fix recognition. Ana Balona de Oliveira sifts through the bones and ruins of Costa's Fontaínha trilogy, set in a disappearing Lisbon slum
Pedro Costa (born in Lisbon in 1959) recently concluded his film trilogy, begun in 1997 with Ossos (Bones) and continued in 2000 with No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room). The closing of this indelibly moving and harsh cinematic journey through Lisbon’s Fontaínhas slum district took place in 2004 with Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth), presented in the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, as well as among other film festivals and several museums worldwide. It was finally released in London with screenings at the Ciné Lumière (April 2008) and the ICA (June 2008), while the whole of Costa’s oeuvre will be presented in a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2009.
Submitted by mute on Thursday, 19 June, 2008 - 16:17
Mute
If the government is to be believed, we are undergoing a streak of freakily bad luck. First the credit crunch, then astronomical fuel price hikes and now a global food crisis. Could all these by any chance be connected?
Neoliberal policy makers and money-men clearly don't think so, since they are advocating more of the same medicine as a cure - further deregulation of food markets, more restructuring of developing countries sweetened by aid packages, more biotech and, of course, bank bail-outs to sustain the whole debt-addicted economy. In other words, propping up a system that will continue to force famished populations to grow export-only crops, to be fuel-intensively shipped to the developed world, to stock supermarket shelves at inflated prices for debt-encumbered consumers, while the famished producers pay through the nose for imported food at prices inflated by the flight of investment from mortgages into basic commodities. A vicious circle indeed.
Submitted by anthony on Tuesday, 17 June, 2008 - 11:50
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt / Variant editorial
Variant, one of the few magazines covering the grim process of stealth privatisation of Glasgow's cultural assets, appears to have been specifically targeted by one of the very privateers it criticised, and who has banned its distribution at Tramway gallery, in a highly defensive abuse of power:
Submitted by mute on Thursday, 12 June, 2008 - 14:47
Randy Martin
As the US subprime mortgage crisis plays out, the ‘dual morality’ of its victims' treatment becomes stark. But, Randy Martin explains, bailing-out the banks while leaving defaulters to rot is just the latest in a 30 year campaign of ripping off the American working class
Submitted by mute on Tuesday, 3 June, 2008 - 18:19
Stefan Meretz
In July last year Mute published Dmytri Kleiner's critique of copyright and its 'radical' copyleft alternative, presenting a reformist programme based on Ricardo's 'iron law of wages'. But Marx demolished this analysis 140 years ago, argues Stefan Meretz. Time for FLOSS to catch up?
Submitted by mute on Wednesday, 28 May, 2008 - 18:12
John Wollaston
The recent London performance of Luigi Nono's composition for orchestra and live-processing, Prometeo, was presented as an apotheosis of the Italian composer's work. John Wollaston essays a paraphrase of this complex 'super-capsule' of the untransmittable
Listen to this moment, a weak power thinking bringing to a halt – Chorus, Prometeo
Submitted by admin on Tuesday, 27 May, 2008 - 15:50
James Heartfield
As the UK creative economy flags, the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA)'s corrective is 'innovation'. But without investment, is this any more than a word? James Heartfield reports
At the Royal Festival Hall the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) promised to take us to the ‘Innovation Edge’, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and inspirational speakers Tim Berners Lee and Bob Geldof.
The driving muzak – ‘we can be heroes’, ‘we are the champions’, ‘let it shine’ – all conforms to Blodheim’s injunctions on Jazz in the Third Reich.[1] This is a New Labour in drag, as it were, aping the mannerisms of business leaders at a Davos conference. They are ‘innovators’. Even the policy makers are re-branded as ‘social innovators’. But as so often, the empty vessel sounds the loudest. The insistent claims of innovation are only evidence of its absence.
Submitted by admin on Friday, 23 May, 2008 - 10:47
Matthew Fuller
This year’s Futuresonic festival in Manchester attempted to spark an alternative vision of social networking software. Matthew Fuller, software critic and participating artist, recognises its urgent necessity
Submitted by mute on Wednesday, 14 May, 2008 - 13:14
Madame Tlank
The UK's health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State's policies, targets, and projects, and uncovers the warped logic and fragmenting effects of marketised welfare
Well Jeff, ... the fact is that you have the luxury of knowing that you will never ever ever ever EVER be faced with the government bossing you around like a child, simply because you have a parasite living in your body.
- The Law Fairy, Feministing.com
By now people have forgotten what history has proven: that ‘raising' a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970
In what follows I wish to consider the effects of recent UK health and social policies on women and their children who are labeled ‘at risk'.[1]
Taking issue with the argument that, after decentralisation, control is embodied within the protocols of networks, Harry Halpin gives a historical account of the all-too-human actors vying for power over the net. Not technical standards but immaterial aristocrats rule cyberspace and their seats of power are vulnerable to revolutionary attack
Submitted by mute on Thursday, 1 May, 2008 - 18:20
Paul Helliwell
To celebrate Mayday and in anticipation of the leftist ‘danse macabre’ which the anniversary of May ’68 once again promises to be, Mute offers a skeleton for the soixante-huitard feast: Here, Paul Helliwell exhumes the Althusserian preconditions of Jacques Ranciere’s insistently superficial aesthetic politics, and questions whether a notion of the hidden might not still have something decisive to show us
‘There is no science… but of the hidden’ – a phrase by Bachelard taken up by the Althusserians. – Jacques Rancière from ‘The Janus-Face of Politicised Art’[1]
