An Albanian woman writes about her experience with prostitution and drug dealing in Greece (defending her choices all the way), setting up a grassroots support organisation, and about NGOs in Albania as agents for the interests of centralised elites. This was first published in the Harm Reduction Communication newsletter, Summer 2001, but is still relevant considering the increasing presence of EU/NATO military forces and NGOs in the area given Kosovo's imminent declaration of independence.

URGENT BIOPOWER UPDATE, not in the dubious, never-defined sense of 'biopolitical struggle', but in its everyday, concrete meaning.  That is, institutions directly claiming administrative sovereignty over masses of human life-matter, with absolute priority over any subjective impulses from the flesh in question.  And of course it's not just any institutions or any flesh: US medical authorities are demanding that the medical system intervene to maintain ALL women's childbearing capacity regardless of those women's own wishes.  In the bluntest practical terms, t

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting.

Lutham Blissett on gender, networks and the PGA conference in Serbia

"Strange En counter 2004"

"It is often better to write your account of a conference before you go, then the facts don't get in the way of the truth", Lutham Blissett

Strange En counter 2004

Stewart Home sniffs out some links between art, farts and modernist materialism in three novels by French songwriters and litterateurs Boris Vian and Serge Gainsbourg

Ilya Gridneff visits one of the granddaddies of transgressive performance art and discovers that, when it comes to upsetting authority, shit, piss and self-immolation have definitely entered their neo-classical period

Digital Diaries: risky
One step beyond Jennicam is Digital Diaries by Natacha Merritt. Natacha fucks people and photographs herself doing it. Edgy, voyeuristic, very real and already spreading virally among Mutoid porn fans. [Taschen £16.99]
HK

Digital Diaries: risqué

The desire to move beyond traditional gender constructions has led women to myriad experiments with online identity. Artists like Francesca da Rimini have made its fluid shapes their prime focus of activity and continue to morph text/erotics/play to port flesh into virtuality and virtuality into the flesh. Sue Thomas looks at two sides of the coin: sexual liberation and online suicide.

Tom McCarthey reviews C. Penley's latest book