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Technology

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

 

Class Power on Zero-Hours (excerpt)

Sorry We Missed You, anonymous graffitti by a Tesco worker

To coincide with Danny Hayward's review of Class Power on Zero-Hours we asked the AngryWorkers for permission to publish two excerpts from their recent book

 

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:

 

Breakthroughs & Bait: on Xenofeminism & Alienation

boattr – the towpath bio- & technosphere

A boat book - computer book stored on a Raspberry Pi computer packaged in a VHS case

 

Also available as online sd card image to download.

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A Worker Informs a Lord on the Subject of the Guillotine

Adapted from Heinrich Heine, Wintermärchen. 1844.

 

 

“King Louis the fifteen died,

 Quite peaceful, alone in his bed.

The sixteenth, however, was guillotined,

Along with Queen Antoinette.

 

The queen showed great courage,as has been told, given the severe situation,

Although her small dog did yelp and did cry

While she suffered her neck laceration.”

Memes With Force – Lessons from the Yellow Vests

People have theorised recent social movements as memes before. However, they tend to make the phrase eclipse the content, placing the (representational) meme over the (real) movement. In the following article, Paul Torino & Adrian Wohlleben, two American participants in the Gilets jaunes struggle in France, discern an inverse logic in play. This is not so much a movement that uses memes to make symbolic demands as a form of movement as meme.

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