Know Your Memes, Ya'll

The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies presents
"Know Your Memes"
Documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more…

http://knowyourmeme.com/

Associated content:

Media Assemblages

Sweet blog I just found.

Media Assemblages
"A media theory and history blog diagramming how media form assemblages of people, populations, technologies, meanings, and sensations. The evolution of these assemblages, their non-linear dynamics, their affects, and self-organizing capacities are what is explored in these postings."

--->
A tour de force of various post-structuralist thinkers as they relate to media ecologies. An amazing mix of cut-up, hyper-text, youtube, diagrams, pictorials, and the like. Definitely worth taking a look at.

Take a peak at "The Production of Habit: On Two Conceptions of Difference in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish"

or "On the Work of Art Today: Benjamin and the Machinic Phylum".

Tarnac Interview // New School (Non)Response

Le Monde interview [translated by NOT BORED!].

For those of you following the continuing Tarnac 9 saga, this piece adds a rich layer to the already complicated Sarko tar-and-feathering of "anarcho-autonomists" via ever more expansive 'anti-terror' laws.

And for the rest of us, a rare and beautiful rendering of politics...

My comrades and I are only a variable in this adjustment. One suspects us like so many others, so many “youths,” so many “gangs,” of having no solidarity with a world that is collapsing. On this one point, one doesn’t lie. Fortunately, this heap of swindlers, impostors, industrialists, financiers and prostitutes; this entire Mazarin’s court full of neuroleptics, Disney versions of Louis Napoleon, and Sunday shows that grip the country for an hour lack an elementary sense of dialectics. Each step that they take towards total control brings them closer to their fear. Each new “victory” with which they flatter themselves spreads a little further the desire to see them defeated in their turn. Each maneuver that they figure comforts their power ends up rendering it detestable. In other words: the situation is excellent. This isn’t the moment to lose courage.

which also reminds me of the recent (non)response to New School's continued attempt to bring down disciplinary action on those who have participated in continued occupations.

the whole thing's a pleasure to read, but here are some snippets:

(c) At what point did the occupiers indicate that they would leave the building peacefully?

Clearly, the moment when the occupiers announced their peaceful intentions to leave the building was on the rooftop after they dropped the OCCUPY EVERYTHING banner but before they unfurled the APRIL FOOLS MOTHERFUCKER banner, as they waved black and red flags in masks and read the pamphlet “Anti-Capitalism at the New School” by New School Schwarz und Rot from a bullhorn to the crowd below, which started with a line from Walter Benjamin that said:
* *
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.

(e) What was the reaction of the occupiers?

Inside:
Occupier X: Hey, Y, are we occupying this building unlawfully, as he said?
Occupier Y: Yes.
Occupier X: Well, how come we didn’t get a permit first, and occupy it lawfully?
Occupier Y: Because you’re a fucking idiot, X.

ON BRICOLAGE

ASSEMBLING CULTURE WITH WHATEVER COMES TO HAND
by Anne-Marie Boisvert, translated by Timothy Barnard

...Remix culture is a culture of quoting, and of the remake. But it is also a culture of intervention and reinvention whose goal is entertainment but also communion and liberation. The artist at the controls wittingly yields to chance (in the form of "glitches", among other things), and to the means at hand in his or her creative process - because, while the result matters, it matters less than the process, the performance, and the event. Remix culture borrows its sensorial saturation from post-industrial society, but reproduces this saturation in an aesthetic context that channels it. Remix "artworks" remain "open", bringing some sense to the world's cacophony (at least for a moment). Yet this is achieved via ephemeral bricolages and assemblages, which are always subject to transformation, and always susceptible to being reorganized in a new way....

Read The Rest Here

foraging wild edibles walk on Sunday, 11 am

A message from Hugh:

I wanted to mention that Nancy and I are leading a foraging wild edibles walk on Sunday at 11 for the Free the Planet student group. Anyone from the CS group is welcome to come along if they're interested. We're meeting at the solar bike shelter on the bike path by the marsh at 11 and will make a loop around the marsh and through the woods along the river, pointing out a couple dozen or so wild edibles (and also poisonous plants) common in central Ohio.

Dance Party THURSDAY

Though the poll (at the time of its deletion) was tied six and six, the Dance Party will have to be on Thursday on account of the Peach District Festival--and of course you're going, so you don't want it to be on Friday either.

Speaking of the Peach District Festival....


THE PEACH DISTRICT FESTIVAL!!!!




YAH will be there. Why wouldn't you be?

Dance Party

However: Thursday or Friday? Vote for the day that works best for y'all on the poll to the right. Also comment on this post if you want to help out in some way (printing out literature, outreach, setting up, tearing down, playlist input, visual stimulation input, suggestions, etc.).

Here's some info from the last dance party that still applies:

Classrooms - pretty overdetermined spaces, right? Especially lecture halls. Partitioned off rows, a big whiteboard/screen with the professor ("he who knows") filling your mind like an empty vessel.

Well, now is your chance to challenge the hegemony of classroom space. We will be experiencing the various ways feelings, emotions, ideas, movement, and sound circulate within spaces that are built to repress, separate, quiet and isolate.

Please remember that OSU is alcohol and drug-free. This event is meant to be potentially trangressive but not illegal or against the student code of conduct.

This event will explore the intersection of the built environment, over-determined spaces, and the audio-visual affective circulation of techno music. The text we will use to inform our analysis is Michel Gaillot's "Techno: Multiple Meaning, An Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present" [http://openlibrary.org/b/OL9010128M/Techno]

Location:
Hagerty Hall 180 -- might have to use the back doors near the loading dock.
Street:
1775 College Rd

This event is sponsored by the Comparative Studies Undergraduate Group on paper and You Are Here Columbus.