What is radical research? Does it emanate from grass roots social movements, the universities, both, or neither? Melancholic Troglodytes review AK Press’s recent collection of ‘militant research’ with an illustrated tour following the book's line of enquiry from the ‘ivory tower to the barricades’

Professor,
take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.

– Vladimir Mayakovsky

This collection of essays by self-described activists, academics, artists, anarchists, autonomist Marxists and situationists is an attempt to theorise the ‘social movement’. The topics under investigation cover a broad range from struggles within universities and factories to guerrilla gardening and anti-racist pedagogy. What unites them is the adoption of qualitative research methods influenced by postmodern currents within the social sciences.

Finally, the pundits of Creative Economies and all that malarkey will be forced to confront their own bastard child: SportArt. Despite the eagerness to strip mine 'creativity' and 'leisure' in an effort to stave off economic doom, the consensual hallucination of a Creative Economy on which it rests is turning more psychedelic than value-producing. While erstwhile 'industry leaders' like super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist subject themselves to marathon public mea culpas (cf. his forthcoming 24hr talk on Art + Finance at the Serpentine) others, such as the SportArtists, are quietly turning the distinctions between sport and art into spaghetti shapes. As they so provocatively ask, who will sponsor this aberration? What does it mean for audience participation? What does it mean when the Arts Council starts sponsoring people to go to holiday resorts and roll pebbles? And will the media start asking 'but is it sport?'

Calla d'Or, Majorca
12th-16th October 2006

Inclusive registration fee (travel, accommodation, registration) is £250

Stewart Home reviews two new publications dealing with the Situationist International and other political currents of the 1960s: Art-Ist magazine's Situationist International special issue and Dancin’ In The Streets!, a collection of texts from Rebel Worker and Heatwave

Did Guy Debord kill the avant-garde? Two new translations of works by the Situationist capo de tutti capi (Complete Cinematic Works and Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici) give ample proof of death’s regenerative effects, says Stewart Home

Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, Guy Debord, translated and edited by Ken Knabb, AK Press, Oakland and Edinburgh 2003
Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici, Guy Debord, translated by Robert Greene, Tam Tam Books, Los Angeles 2001

Benedict Seymour discusses Simon Sadler's latest work
(MIT Press, hb £24.95)

Faced with this scrupulous academic history of Situationist architectural theory, hardline pro-Situationists will no doubt suspect a truncated account of the Situationist project. Sadler anticipates these accusations, acknowledging that his narrow focus on the urban theory produced in the inital phase of their activity necessarily isolates Situationist ideas about the modern city from a much broader revolutionary program (they were, after all, taking on 'the ideological totality of the Western world', not just building Domes or diverting traffic). Nonetheless, he succeeds in clarifying key ideas by 're-zoning' the Situationists into the territory of post-war mainstream and experimental architectural debates, working outwards to hint at the broader implications of the Situationists' 'unitary urbanism'.

Molecular Invasion follows up the thesis advanced in Critical Art Ensemble’s previous Autonomedia booklet, The Flesh Machine. A collective of artists/activists, CAE owe their early reputation mainly to their work on electronic civil disobedience and electronic disturbance. The group’s take on theory and the politics of technoscience has always been preeminently pragmatic and action oriented, rooted in a tradition of street activism and situationist performance in public spaces – virtual and actual.