"Keep Warm, Burn Britain!" Screening, New York, Oct. 3, 2004

"Keep Warm, Burn Britain!" is filmmaker Ross Lipman's documentary/memoir of
the
squatting movement in England in the mid 1980s. It chronicles the lives of
the anarchists, outcasts, and punks who lived in a small enclave of
abandoned buildings south of the Thames in East London; an area known in
the anarchist community as "Squatter's Paradise". After a brief outsider
renaissance the buildings were destroyed and their dwellers dispersed; a
forgotten moment in the broadscale gentrification of Docklands
Development.

"Keep Warm, Burn Britain!" moves freely from the chaotic lives
of the squatters to the broad social canvas in which their tales unfold;
buildings and lives swept up in the sea of change that swallows cities and
time.

A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark's book
challenges the new regime of property relations with all
the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and
revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos. — Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire

Type hello to the nascent "hacker class," McKenzie Wark's loose
confederation of fixers, file sharers, inventors, shut-ins,
philosophers, programmers, and pirates... The Lang College
professor's ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of
hope in this cyber-global-corporate-brute world of ours, and he
fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy visionaries from all fields who
"hack" the relationships and meanings the rest of us take for
granted. If we hackers-of words, computers, sound, science,
etc.-organize i
nto a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues,
then the world can be ours. — Hua Hsu, Village Voice

A double is haunting the world — the double of
abstraction, the virtual reality of information,
programming or poetry, math or music, curves or
colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies,
companies and communities now depend. The bold aim
of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose,
and interests of the emerging class responsible for
making this new world — for producing the new
concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of
the stuff of raw data.

"The Dromocratic Condition" Conference:

Contemporary Cultures of Acceleration

University of Newcastle upon Tyne, March 12–13, 2005

Theories of contemporary culture have foregrounded the significance of 'late
capitalism' or 'post-Fordism' (Jameson; Harvey); simulation and
'hyper-reality' (Baudrillard); information technology and the 'inhuman'
(Lyotard); the 'panopticon' (Foucault); 'communicative action' (Habermas);
'desiring-production' and schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari); risk (Ulrich
Beck); and the cyborg (Haraway).

An alternative theorisation — which intersects with these perspectives, but
diverges from them — views acceleration as the defining feature of the
contemporary era. The French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has coined the
term 'dromocracy' (from the Greek dromos: avenue or race course) to
characterise this position. Under Virilio's 'dromocratic' reading of
history, scientific, technological, societal, military, and cultural change
is propelled by the pursuit of ever-increasing speed. Our own era — with its
fibre-optic cables, satellite-linked communications networks, supersonic
aircraft, and cruise missiles — is, Virilio suggests, approaching the limits
of acceleration, and teeters on the edge of the 'integral accident' - the
true end of modernity.

DVDs

The Velvet Light Trap

A Critical Journal of Film & Television

Issue Number 56, Fall 2005

Issue Theme: DVDs

Less than a decade after their entry into the market, the impact of DVDs has already become visible in media production strategies, legal and economic policy, marketing and distribution, exhibition environments, and audience reception habits. Decisions on style and content during shooting of film and television programs increasingly take into consideration possibilities for cross-media consumption. Recent years have also seen increased visibility of short forms such as making-of documentaries and other bonus features. Direct to consumer sales have created lucrative markets for otherwise marginal films and television programs and have affected habits of consumption. The home viewing environment, finally, opens possibilities for interfaces with other end-user entertainment technologies.

The Velvet Light Trap invites papers exploring issues surrounding DVD technology as part of audiovisual culture and practice. In addition to papers focusing on technology, we seek papers that examine DVDs in relation to questions of aesthetics, narrative construction, genre, production, promotion/distribution, exhibition, and reception — including issues of economic consumption and cultural use — from local, national, or global perspectives.