Initially a vital component of experimental black film culture, the Black Audio Film Collective quickly arrived at retrospective respectability. Josephine Berry Slater enters the memory space of their recent show at FACT and retrieves the radical yet 'still born' possibilities from its multi-media memorial

Let them bear witness to the process by which the living transform the dead into partners in struggle, Handsworth Songs, BAFC

I am the sky computer, Lee Perry

No other group has had such a catalysing influence on the new political forms and tactics espoused by the anti-globalisation movement, yet there has been too little critical analysis of the Zapatistas' politics and the relationship of western activists to their guerilla icons. Melancholic Troglodytes review Mihalis Mentinis' book Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means for Radical Politics and discovers some ugly nationalist features behind the mask

This [Marcos] is grown from man to dragon.
He has wings, he’s more than a creeping thing.
– Coriolanus, V.4, William Shakespeare

Despite its hackneyed front cover, Mentinis’ Zapatistas proves to be a gem of a book. In our view, it represents the most original analysis of the Chiapas revolt currently available in the English language. Furthermore, it may even have wider implications for radical politics beyond the confines of the Zapatistas. 
  

At industry pop’s polar opposite, improvisers are involved in a musical praxis which resists formulated goals, ready-made forms and final outcomes. Here, Mattin extrapolates the politics from the tactics of improvisation

Just as, in a game, the victory of one of the players is not (with respect to the game) an originary state to be restored, but only the stake that doesn’t pre-exist the game but results from it, so pure violence – which is the name that Benjamin gives to human action which neither founds nor conserves law – is not an originary figure of human action that at a certain moment is seized and inscribed in the juridical order (just as for speaking man there is no pre-linguistic reality which, at a certain moment, would fall into language.)
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception

Once we understand that we are embedded in contradictory social relations, we can also see that the contradictions themselves run deeper than the law that pretends to organise them.

For a while now, old, long outdated video game consoles of the 80s such as the Atari 2600 or the Vectrex have been enjoying something of a renaissance. They've found their way into the canon of good taste; a multitude of records and T-shirts are testimony to that. PC emulators for old school games are being introduced everywhere with verve, as if every reviewer has to prove his or her proper socialisation with the holy trinity of Pong, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.
 
But the nostalgic and sentimental enthusiasm for the cute little games of yore is being played out on another level as well. Strategies are also being developed for saving the endangered artefacts of digital culture.

Revolution@ISEA98

Universal Plastic Surgery: The Right of Man?

The trees here are all twenty paces apart. I know - I measured with my own feet. The city is owned wholly by the Irvine Company, leased to beautiful people and approved companies. Every morning at sunrise an army of dark-skinned people invade to prune the bushes, sweep the streets and sidewalks, trim the trees, and rearrange the flower beds with season-appropriate colours; most of these folks are gone by lunch time. I'm reminded of a little robot Isaac Asimov once envisioned: a quaint, bug-like, bot that would, unbeknownst to us, live in our hair - trimming it, keeping it presentable.

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A
"What does the Net mean for politics?" Anarchists, nazis, extropians, pornographers, sex-crazed teenagers, book-worm teenagers, budgerigar fanatics, isolated octogenarians, hairdressers - you name it, the Net is home to them all. Or is it? Who gains ascendance within cyberspace? Who has the power in this, the latest technological utopia? Is the Net just a tool or is that popular description just another disingenuous trick - the powerful letting the powerless play with hand-me-down toys while they get on with more serious business. We asked a not-so-random selection of net users what they think.
With an introduction by McKenzie Wark

X The other Tony B.

Shopping and Financing

Until quite recently, you didn't need to be a hardline feminist to testify to the mind-numbing boredom associated with the weekly supermarket shop. Now, however, things are changing: backed up by a plethora of TV shows and numerous restaurant spin-off recipe books dedicated to ever more exotic ingredients, food has become sexy. As a consequence, our shopping lists have become more adventurous and the supermarkets are proving quick to take advantage of our latest obsession.

At the same time, technological developments are enabling us to satisfy our gastronomic desires digitally. The recent launch of several on-line supermarkets, most notably Tesco [www.tesco.co.uk], along with the re-invention of food shopping as a lifestyle activity, are raising questions about the cultural perception of shopping.

Since the late 80s, Lettre International, the 'European Magazine for Culture', has represented a network of independent magazines from a variety of cities, including Madrid, Rome, Bucharest and Budapest - all of which work on a file sharing basis. Equipped with this international approach, Berlin's Lettre, one of Germany's most celebrated and in-depth (quarterly) periodicals, together with the city of Weimar (Cultural Capital of Europe in '99) and the Goethe Institute, recently initiated a philosophical competition in the tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the outset, theorists worldwide were asked to formulate the question they considered most crucial for global affairs at the end of the 20th century. The 'master question' - "Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?" - was subsequently chosen by a panel of philosophers and distributed worldwide for literally anyone to answer. Whether intended as an either/or formula, a to-be-proven factual suggestion or a manual for DIY history, the question might, probably, be answered by explorations into the state of the present.

God games are a genre of video games which position the player as an invisible controller/manager/all-seeing-being of a simulated real-time world. From the early days of pixellated three-quarter view landscapes with tiny bit-mapped creatures running around, to today's slick, beautifully rendered, near-photographic 3D panoramas with convincing creatures and stunning special effects, the task remains the same: to nurture, coerce and assist the inhabitants or bully, maim and generally subject your populace to a lighter shade of Armageddon. The result of your labours is to either bring peace and tranquillity to the kingdom, or throw it into terminal darkness. Grandfather of God games is Peter Molyneux, one of the figureheads of the games world and developer of the soon to be released title Black and White– featuring bells, whistles and a huge creature that you directly control. John Paul Bichard catches up with Peter Molyneux at his Guildford bunker and tries to dig beneath the cranium of the man who would be God.

Simon Worthington sings the highlights,Totally Out Of Tune

I'm outside the new HTBA centre and Lone Twin are performing Ghost Dance. From 9am to 9pm this blindfolded pair of men, dressed as cowboys, perform a gruelling methodical step dance in a cobbled courtyard. Deprived of sight, the leather-chapped men use the sound of their hands slapping their chaps to map out the space and locate each other. Slowly but surely they circle around, never touching the walls or each other.

>> Hayley Newman, Score for 10’s 12lbs; Charlemagne Palestine. Photos: iD.8 Photography

The Internet is having interesting effects on the laws of supply and demand, says moonlighting grave-spotter Josephine Berry

Oh for the blessed release of death. Never to have the meaning of your existence cast into doubt by the callous automations of call answering systems, never to have to watch your past year abstracted into transactional tabulations for your accountant's (anal) pleasure, never to have to consider how you've internalised your pin code and bank account numbers as deeply as your mother's name. Death as a leap into postlinguistic nothingness, as a release from the weight of information.

For all those who walk London's streets wondering whether brekky has been spiked; for all those who think the millenniumdome is really an enormous hallucinogen; for all those who think the mayoral candidates are from Mars, Matthew Fuller has a surprise. If you see scary surrealism in today's London, wait for the magic realism of tomorrow.

Take three millennial London moments: Conservative mayoral candidate Jeffrey Archer's exposure as a liar; the city police's response to J18 and N30 carnivals against capitalism; and the Lord Mayor's parade. In the image of which shall we cast the future of the city? Let's ask the Mayor. In London's fairy kingdom, where magic wands and realist fists rule in perfect harmony, Matthew Fuller listens in on the interior monologue of a civic Godhead.

>> Photographs by Daniel Jackson

Textual time travel courtesy of Mute contributors' heroes The Human League, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, John Milton, Félix Guattari, Toni Negri, Jacques Attali, Martin Heidegger, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Michael Bakunin, John Jesurun, Confucius, John Cage, Martin Heidegger, Antonin Artaud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nikola Tesla, Joe Denver and Gary Chalk, Ibn Al-Haytham, Danilo Kis and Imamu Amiri Baraka.

The British press is increasingly prepared to identify a new American imperialism in the global arena. When it comes to related domestic subjects however, even its liberal left seems incapable of expressing anti-imperialist interpretations. Analysed together with the generalised hysteria over Islam, the outlines of a new racial ideology start to emerge. By Ali Nobil Ahmad