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Society

STR!KE

uni death

In unprecedented numbers, UK universities are on strike. The UCU-led action broaches the full spectrum of neoliberal misery to which the marketised university subjects both workers and students, via the ‘Four Fights’ of pay, workload, equality and casualisation. Even London’s Royal College of Art, latterly regarded as immune to workplace politics of radical solidarity, is experiencing a historic resurgence of unionising and protest. Its loudly trumpeted status as ‘No.

25 Artists and Cultural Workers Divest from Zabludowicz

BDZ Press Release 

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen contrasts Judith Butler's democratic analysis of Occupy in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly with the concept of permanent destitution as developed by Marcello Tarì in There is no Unhappy Revolution, appearing in English with Common Notions this month.

 

“Now comes the question of the reappropriation of violence, which the biopolitical democracies have, with all other intense expressions of life, so perfectly dispossessed”

Originally published on Lundi matin, September 9th, 2019

 

 

Video Vortex XII proceedings: art, archive, algorithms, activism

Video Vortex, an artistic network concerned with the aesthetics and politics of online video, gathered again in Malta for a two-day conference. We were in particularly focussing on bringing new research, theory and critiques of online video– in addition to questions around its integration with social media – to Malta. These proceedings are an edited collection of assembled and annotated video essays living in two instantiations: an online version – located on the web at https://vv12.org, and an offline version – stored on a server inside a VHS case.

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Cars, Riots & Black Liberation

Cars, Riots, & Black Liberation: Philadelphia’s Walter Wallace Rebellion

The US saw some of the largest riots and protests in its history this year in response to the continuing police murder of black people – most recently the Walter Wallace Rebellion in Philadelphia. Yet there has been scant attention paid to the innovations in struggle specific to these logical revolts. Shemon & Arturo take another look at the phenomenon of car-looting and argue that this tactic is inseparable from black liberation 

 

Primer′

Benedict Seymour's speculative fiction on the post-internet artworld in London dates from June 2013 but points forward to the apotheosis of Trump (developer and author of 'The Art of the Deal'), and June 2020 (the George Floyd Uprising). Step inside the box...

 

They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more.

– “Primer” (2004), directed by Shane Carruth.

Three Class Struggles and a Funeral

Your mum tesco (anonymous graffiti)

In his review of the recent book Class Power on Zero-Hours (PM Press, 2020), Danny Hayward reflects with enthusiasm on AngryWorkers' attempt to pop the left's cosmopolitan bubble, following their journey through the warehouses, factories and customer fulfilment centres of suburban West London, to reveal the mass of contradictions presently known as the UK

 

This isn't a Virus, it's a Time Machine

Still from Dead the End (2017), a film by Benedict Seymour. https://vimeo.com/211367509

In a 2015 London Review of Books essay Fredric Jameson briefly imagines the Bolshevik Party as a kind of time machine. The party is a device by means of which Leninist revolutionaries effect a collective leap into the future:

 

On 20 February, art school workers across Britain began an unprecedented fourteen days of strike action.The number of strike days is escalating each week; if the strike holds there will be very little art tuition nationally through the week starting 9 March. 

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