"Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimetre longer each day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrecognizable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza still be Tereza?"
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.

There is increasing concern amongst a wide range of commentators that human nature is in the process of being irrevocably changed by technological advances which either have been achieved or are in the pipeline. According to a multitude of op-ed writers, cultural critics, social scientists and philosophers, we have not faced up to the grave implications of what is happening. We are sleep-walking and need to wake up. Human life is being so radically transformed that our very essence as human beings is under threat.

Of course, apocalypse sells product, and one should not regard the epidemiology of panic as a guide to social or any other kind of reality. The fact that one of the most quoted panickers about the future is Francis Fukuyama, who has got both the past wrong (The End of History) and the present wrong (recovered neo-con Pentagon hawk), should itself be reassurance enough. Nevertheless, it is still worthwhile challenging the assumptions of those such as Fukuyama who are trying to persuade us to be queasy about the consequences of the various technologies that have brought about enhancement of human possibility and, indeed, want to call a halt to certain lines of inquiry, notably in biotechnology. [...]

For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?

"Germany has barred the makers of a movie about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler from filming at German military sites because its star Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, the Defence Ministry said on Monday. Cruise, also one of the film's producers, is a member of the Church of Scientology which the German government does not recognize as a church. Berlin says it masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientology leaders reject."

Having had his fill of the world's relentless mediocrity, hypocrisy and repression, Anton LaVey declared war in 1966 by shaving his head and founding the Church of Satan. His literary blueprint for responsible self-indulgence, The Satanic Bible, soon sold millions of copies worldwide thus generating decades of media furor and Judeo-Christian wrath. But, as revealed in his presentation, LaVey's detractors remain largely fanatical and uninformed and continue to attribute foul practices such as ritual animal sacrifices to his church, when, in truth, the nature-loving LaVey was an outspoken animal activist long before it was fashionable.

Speak of the Devil explores dozens of other myths and misconceptions about Satanism and its "Black Pope"... in this, his first feature-length documentary in over twenty years, Anton LaVey will offer a rare and treasured glimpse into his private world and share remembrances of his many fascinating careers, which include stints as a lion tamer, theatre organist, crime photographer, and psychic investigator. You'll tour the fabled "Den of Iniquity" where the maestro gives stirring concerts amidst a host of artificial human companions, designed and constructed by his own magical hands... you'll also meet a colorful array of LaVey's acolytes and admirers who have descended into his expansive labyrinth of ideas and practices, only to resurface far better equipped for the age-old struggle ahead.

Isn't it strange that our desire for newer and ever more dazzling media machines is equaled only by our wish to escape them? From mathematical perspective to the camera obscura, from photography to cinema -- television, the internet, virtual reality environments and all the more far-out sorts of artificial intelligence -- innovations in media have always been driven by the desire to overcome mediation. Whether it is the frame, the wire, location, bodies or simply physical presence that it eliminates, each new device promises to deliver the same content as its predecessor, only more immediately, which is to say without the clumsy medium in which the signal had been trapped. Jay Bolter and Robert Grusin have shown how this desire to escape media by means of media has developed according to a logic that they call "remediation." Television gives us everything film offered, but without the apparatus of the projector and the centralized theater. The laptop accomplishes what the portable computer was supposed to do, just as the PDA puts us in touch with everything the laptop promised but failed to deliver. And now wireless technology promises to accomplish all of this without the restrictions of any centralized location at all.

Bolter and Grusin's McLuhanesque thesis is useful for understanding the history of information technology, but it raises still more interesting questions about the nature of mediation per se. After all, what is a medium? Why is it necessary? Is it? Why the endless desire to eliminate it in the name of immediacy? What are the wider social and political consequences of the desire for immediacy? As long as we remain focused on questions of media ownership or the meaning of messages, we miss our deeply tortuous relation with the fact of mediation itself. Media are at once necessary means of communication and -- since they can always be speeded up, rationalized and made more efficient -- obstacles in the way of a more effective delivery of information. [...]

"Film Noir" is notoriously difficult to define. Once you move past the familiar images (trench coats, shadows), stock characters (the femme fatale, the private dick), standard moods (urban malaise, fatalism), and a core group of classic films (John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon," for example, or Tay Garnett's "The Postman Always Rings Twice"), there's wide disagreement among critics and scholars about what actually makes a movie "noir." Does film noir belong to a specific historical time and place (Hollywood from 1941 to 1958, say) or can it be made anywhere, at any time?

Liquid H2O is the sine qua non of life. Making up about 66 percent of the human body, water runs through the blood, inhabits the cells, and lurks in the spaces between. At every moment water escapes the body through sweat, urination, defecation or exhaled breath, among other routes. Replacing these lost stores is essential but rehydration can be overdone. There is such a thing as a fatal water overdose.

The link between superheroes and nationalism is one lesson that can be gleaned from John Bell's Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Despite its bombastic title, Bell's book is, at least in the chapters dealing with the superhero genre, a chronicle of failure. Bell speaks of "the somewhat quixotic search for distinctly Canadian superheroes." "Quixotic" is le mot juste. No Canadian superhero has ever been successful for a sustained period or left a mark on the popular imagination, although there have been many rolls of the dice.

Time after time, Canadian publishers conjured up superheroes that supposedly embodied the national spirit. Aside from Johnny Canuck, there is Nelvana of the Northern Lights (a white goddess in a mini-dress who protected the Arctic from "Kablunets, Nazi allies armed with Thormite Rays"), Captain Jack (an all-round athlete who battled Nazi saboteurs), Northern Light (a science fiction hero whose enemies were space aliens), Captain Canuck (who also fought space monsters as well as complex international banking conspiracies) and the similarly monikered Captain Canada (originally known as Captain Newfoundland, he defended the royal family from giant Japanese robots).

All these characters have their goofy charm, but let's face reality: none of them is a superhero of the first rank. They are not fit to hold the cape of Superman or Batman. They don't even have what it takes to be a sidekick to Wonder Woman or Captain America. Creating a Canadian superhero is rather like growing bananas in Nunavut. With enough ingenuity and willpower you can do it, but is it worth doing?

Within the framework of the Mars500 programme, the European Space (ESA) initiates a call for candidates to participate in up to three isolation confinement studies. ESA is looking for 2 European candidates and 2 candidates per study. The first in a series of isolation and confinement will commence in the timeframe May-July 2008. Serious applicants are fill out an application form, which can be obtained by download from: www.spaceflight.esa.int/callforcandidates

After the backlash comes the return to orthodoxy. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking suggested that physics was on the verge of solving the final puzzles of creation: the marriage of quantum physics and gravity and the origin of the universe. Since then, there has been a general sense of disappointment at the progress made by pretenders such as string theory. A number of works have suggested that mankind is still scrabbling around in the foothills of understanding, and that the universe may not even be ultimately explicable by our scientific and mathematical tools. Now, in a new magisterial account of the state of modern physics, Stenger reasserts the original optimistic outlook: physics has explained almost all that is and has been, and the few remaining pockets of resistance must soon fall.

He argues that the measure of the success of physics is that it can be encapsulated in a set of succinct equations which account for almost all human experience. In the first half of the book, he guides the reader through the historical development of physics, passing through special and general relativity and then dealing with particle physics, embarking on a brief excursion through statistical thermodynamics, before reaching the standard model and finally cosmology. He shows that this historical development can be seen as the expression of two principles: the principle of objectivity - that the laws of physics should be independent of our formulation of them and of our position in the universe - and the principle of symmetry. He shows that, in many cases, our theories are the simplest that can result from "point of view invariance" and symmetry. Thus, the universe is comprehensible.

Long before what is now called discourse had taken over the institutes of fine arts all over the world, it was in fact already being conducted every evening. Long before what is now called critique of institutions had begun to rattle the foundations of the museums, buildings and programmes were already being vehemently argued about. And the practice, so greatly loved by curators and travelling lecturers, of talking ritually past each other under the umbrella of so-called symposiums has also been cultivated there for years. In the Anzengruber, as far as the fine arts are concerned, there is always Biennale (including buffet and video room) - a little less formal, certainly, than elsewhere, sometimes a little more vehement as well, but always marching onward. And this needs to be stated quite clearly now, when every village between Shanghai and Dubai, Prague and goodness knows where, decks itself out magnificently with its own Biennale and is convinced that it is quite special for doing so. So now: Anzengruber Biennale, for a change, as something official, with pictures for once. After all, not everyone has the entire history of art in mind all the time!

1988: Retired US-Soldier John R. fights along with his former superior and side by side with islamic jihadis against a foreign occupying power in the central-asian desert.

2003: An Anglo-American coalition begins its military action in the gulf.

Zimbabwean despot "laughing" Bob Mugabe's government has rubber-stamped new laws granting his cronies free reign to snoop on communications in the impoverished state.

The Harare harlequin's "Interception of Communications Bill", which was proposed last year, was waved through by his parliament last week.

It hands the communications minister powers to dish out warrants for raiding post, emails, web browsing, and phone lines. Calls were already heavily monitored by the regime at the behest of its increasingly powerless judiciary, so the bill basically cuts out the middle man and acknowledges the internet age.

It compels ISPs to install bugging equipment and make it available to the government at their own expense. Reports say China will offer the hardware.

Mugabe's defenders claim the laws are no different to anti-terror legislation in the US and UK.

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Veins on the stomach of a woman?
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The photo series on this site are guaranteed to meet your desires.
This website will be regularly expanded with new photos and photo series.

Since fewer than 1% of Indians have health insurance, most people pay upfront for care and a personal relationship with a physician is highly prized. The balance of power between doctor and patient is therefore different from the way it is in the West. Farhad Kapadia, a clinical investigator at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai, says that only those who "have absolutely no choice" agree to forsake the judgment of their physician for a protocol randomly selected by a computer which would leave them ignorant about what is being administered to them. So those who take part in clinical trials are the poorest, living in a different world from socially powerful doctors.

"Why wrestle an unwieldy 500-page novel into a screenplay, lopping off key characters and subplots, when you can tackle a much more manageable 20 pages, with a third of the characters and half the irony?"

Emmanuel B is 30, a slender five foot three, and a labourer whose piercing brown eyes tell unspeakable truths. He's not the kind of slave-labourer we're familiar with from 19th-century plantations in the Deep South of the United States. Instead, Emmanuel is a modern-day plantation labourer in 21st-century, post-conflict Liberia, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is his unyielding master. Like many workers on Firestone’s largest rubber plantation, Emmanuel was born in Harbel, has lived in Harbel all his life, and will most likely waste away in Harbel.

As westerners drive around in their heavy-duty SUVs, propelled along on the black gold of Firestone tires, Emmanuel wakes up at the crack of dawn to tap raw latex from 800 rubber trees daily. His clothes are tattered and his shoulders covered in red puss-infected blisters from carrying buckets full of raw latex suspended from an iron pole to the Firestone processing plant two miles from his tapping site.

Emmanuel was gracious enough to demonstrate what a tapper does from sun-up to midmorning. With a pitchfork suspended in the air, he extended his long wiry arms to ease the raw latex out of the trees and into the small red cups that catch it. The drip-drip-drip of the whitecoated liquid was almost as laborious to witness as Emmanuel's daily task – another 799 trees still to go after this one. For Emmanuel and his fellow tappers, a 5am start is the only means of meeting their daily quotas; their wages are reduced by half if they fail to do so. Some have begun to use their children to complete the Herculean task. [...]

When:
Fri, June 15: Noon-6pm
Sat, June 16: Noon-10pm
Sun, June 17: Noon-7pm

Where:
Fort Mason, San Francisco

Man is by nature a political animal
Aristotle, Politics

From one sentence in Aristotle derive two arresting theoretical discourses of the twenty-first century: Michel Foucault's biopolitics, provocatively reformulated by Giorgio Agamben in terms of the relationship between sovereignty and the body, and the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as a means of evaluating and promoting development, justice and freedom. Both are characterized by deep reflection on the sources of Western political thought, and by urgent engagement with contemporary social and legal problems. Both are in some sense biopolitical in that they are shaped by the interplay of the same Aristotelian categories—the human and the animal, politics and nature. But they are on opposite sides of the divide that has opened up in the human sciences since the 1960s, and there currently seems no optic through which they might simultaneously be viewed, no way of integrating or comparing their insights.

In part, this reflects a situation in which political debate appears to have fragmented into a multiplicity of single issues. The ancient 'Who will rule?' and the modern 'Who shall have what?' have been supplemented by an array of questions that deal with matters once exclusively cultural, personal or natural. For previous eras, the relative integrity and unmalleability of cultures, bodies and environments rendered such questions redundant. Now they frequently appear unanswerable from within established political traditions, and incommensurable in relation to each other.

Within this expanded field, biopolitics and the capabilities approach have unusual salience and potential, for both bundle together issues otherwise assumed to be distinct. If they, in turn, could be coordinated, perhaps we could begin to map the new territory. [...]

"As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called 'the essential property of language', the essential building block--in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems--then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language --Pirahã-- means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions."

"We were on vacation in Central Florida from the 10th to the 25th of September in 2001. After intensive tele-visual disaster consumption (shared with the world, no less), we decided for a visit to Walt Disney World (to be more precise, we were mainly concerned with the Magic Kingdom) on 15 September 2001. We entered the premises and strolled along "Main Street USA", when we heard a Disney tune, well-known to us. And as it is usual for a chain-reaction of associations, a strange video-like sequence emerged in our subconsciousness..."

Nearly five centuries separate Thomas More, saint and author of Utopia, from Sean McCarthy, engineer and genial CEO of Steorn, Ltd., an Irish technology development company. Both men have laid claim to utopian discoveries. More's discovery -- related through the voyager Raphael Hythloday -- involves a 1760-year-old society that provides a model of social and economic perfection. McCarthy offers a no less extraordinary claim. His company, so it goes, has stumbled upon a configuration of magnets producing the equivalent output of a perpetual motion machine. Its applications will solve the world's most pressing concerns: energy production, fresh water supplies, even Global Warming. Instant Utopia. Both men's claims have been met, each in its own day, with responses ranging from fawning discipleship to scornful disbelief. After Utopia was published, one theologian asked for directions there so he might convert its inhabitants. In a later edition, More had to drop hints the island was not real, although he still enjoyed pointing "the long nose of scorn" at those naïve enough to take his account of this New World island seriously.

Steorn has had to deal with "the long nose of scorn" pointed in its own direction. Scientists from several universities, McCarthy claims, already have independently validated Steorn's technology, but "always behind closed doors, always off the record, and always proven to work." Perhaps plagued by the memory of Pons and Fleischmann, the largely discredited "discoverers" of cold fusion, not one of these scientists will go on record as having validated Steorn's claim. Publishing a £75,000, one-page ad in The Economist in August of 2006, the company challenged scientists to come forward either to confirm or invalidate its claim. Steorn has selected a twelve-person jury of "the most qualified and the most skeptical" scientists from a pool of 492 applicants to take on the task.

An unusual fossil-hunting team has hit upon an unusual discovery: the oldest found mushroom fossil yet, encased in amber along with a striking example of a parasite feeding upon a parasite. Dated to 100 million years ago by the age of material surrounding the amber, the mushroom joins the exclusive company of just a handful of fossilized fleshy fungal bodies ever found.

The chance of finding such a specimen is tiny. But, George Poinar, an Oregon State University zoologist and president of The Amber Institute, in Corvallis, Oregon, and Ron Buckley, a registered nurse and amateur fossil hunter from Florence, Kentucky, were the lucky amber-obsessed duo to discover it.

Huxley's most famous novel, Brave New World, was published in 1932, and the occasion of this seventy-fifth anniversary should lead us to wonder about his peculiar description of how we understand the future. We live in a time of biotechnological leaps forward that have made the term "Brave New World" almost a reflex for commentators worried we are rushing headlong toward a sterilized post-human society, engineered to joyless joy. It is easy to imagine that we see the shadows of our society in Huxley's vision of the future. But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley's book as an exceedingly successful prophecy actually prevents us from recognizing its real insight? Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times?

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"Although it's common for fans of a canceled series to protest, it's extremely rare that the effort pays off with network executives changing their minds."

Over 500 robots from 30 countries will be competing in the greatest show on earth! You'll jump as 340 pound Combat robots smash into each other! Be amazed by androids that can wrestle, play soccer or do somersaults; intelligent robots that can drive themselves around; and Art Robots that move and even some that make cocktails.

When:
Fri, June 15: Noon-6pm
Sat, June 16: Noon-10pm
Sun, June 17: Noon-7pm

Where:
Fort Mason, San Francisco

Finalists Robert Glashuettner from Austria (age 28) and Carlos Romero from Mexico (age 27) went head to head on the new version, in lieu of the classic '80s title. Both were competing for the chance to win 100,000 Microsoft points (valued at about $1,250), a special Pac-Man edition of the Xbox 360, and free Quizno's sandwiches for the next 26 years. Romero, who has been playing video games since age 6, won the face-off, beating Glashuettner 22,160 to 17,730. As a runner-up, Glashuettner nets 40,000 Microsoft points, which is valued at about $500.

The theme of 2nd Creative Summer Camp is "Technology myths" - interpretations and myths about the development, use and facilities of technologies and its' place in the life of modern human and society. Myth – lies, fantasy or subjective reality? Taking into consideration that myth has been arised from human imaginations or singularity of perception about things. Interpretations about things and occurencies could vary into countless and inconceivable directions.

2nd Creative Summer Camp "Technology myths" will take place in the framework of the of the French Spring and of the 9th "Art+Communication" festival events. The programme will take place from May 31 to June 10, 2007 in Riga, Karosta and Aizpute.

Artists, activists, phylosophers, sociologists, theoreticians and scientists will participate in the common creative weekly meeting - to express the ideas, present works, realised projects and make new on the following keynotes:

* Technologies and human desire to trick them/to pass over sage. About superstition of modern humans, where nowadays technologies rub along with mythological perception. Technological and mythological connections in the ideas, researches and art works.

* Militar and electromagnetic myths. Myths about spying technologies. In the framework of the workshop the working group conducted by Spectral Investigations Collective (France) together with artists, researchers, sociologists, philosophers and scientists will investigate the connection between history and mythology of military sciences, in relation to territory of Latvia.

* Myths of public space, maintained by technologies. How society perceive technologies? Whether and what kind of myths are arising concerning comprehensions of technologies? Myth about the invaluable role of information nowedays and parasiting, based on glorification of information technologies. Absurd myths in public space – tv churchies, virtual churchies etc.

* Contemporary art, media art, based on myths and interpretations.

The main criteria for participating in summer camp is the creative phenomenon of the author – the particular ability to realise the ideas with limited technical resources, discover different use of the everyday goods and make unusual objects for practical application. These are works, which could make specific subculture, united semiotics of technology, technical creation, myths, folklore and perception of life.

Inspired by the proforma of the soviet summer camp for pioneers, creative summer camp will continue tradition, where the main accent is meeting platform for creative people for inspiring new ideas and collaboration models.

It is customary to think about Iran in terms of two ticking alarm clocks, one nuclear, and the other democratic. If the democratic one does not ring first, so this thinking goes, military intervention may be required to stop the nuclear one from going off.

Being a media monkey, my federally allowed contingent of 3 functioning braincells is somewhat overwhelmed by the projects message, so I can't really tell you what it's about. It does, however, vaguely remind me of some of the conventions I went to during my dotcom days.

Except for the mysterious appearance of a speaking cuneiform tablet. That's a new one.

More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.

To read and view the U.S. news media over the past week, there is an episode of grand tyranny unfolding, one repugnant to all who cherish democratic freedoms. The Venezuelan government under "strongman" Hugo Chavez refused to renew the 20-year broadcast license for RCTV, because that medium had the temerity to be critical of his regime. It is a familiar story.

And in this case it is wrong.

Regrettably, the US media coverage of Venezuela's RCTV controversy says more about the deficiencies of our own news media that it does about Venezuela. It demonstrates again, as with the invasion of Iraq, how our news media are far too willing to carry water for Washington than to ascertain and report the truth of the matter.

Here are some of the facts and some of the context that the media have omitted or buried: [...]

"Flaws aside, Spielberg's masterpiece is, I believe, a rather important and uniquely American work of art. The idea of a small-town flatfoot realizing that his duty requires him to step on a boat and head off to sea is a metaphor that not only resonated with WWII veterans in the 70s, but still resonates today with anyone who's had to leave the comforts of home to go confront a threat. Also, with its entire story circling down to that amazing moment when the grizzled old seadog Quint has gotten a look at the beast he's going to be confronting and decides to unpack and assemble a fearsome harpoon, the film strongly echoes Melville, as well as all the other literature and art that's been inspired by America's centuries-long quest to tame the Atlantic ocean. This is one of our touchstone movies that won't go out of style until people have lost their fear of sharks, the ocean, drowning and the unknown in general--in other words, never."