[-empyre-] In Solidarity: We Are All Bang Lab

[Patricia R. Zimmermann]

Thank you to Tim and Renate for convening this polyvocal cauldron of debate, interrogation, righteous rage, and necessary and urgent theoretical dislocations in regards to the heinous activities of the UC system against Bang.lab, Ricardo, Micha, and other activists.

At this moment, solidarity--a meme of action dangling from political movements incubated in other eras that implies both ideas and embodiments--seems even more necessary.  To paraphrase Subcommandante Marcos, we are all Bang.Lab.  We all work for the UC sytem.  We are all under scrutiny. We are all threatened with loss of tenure.  We are all in untenable, contradictory positions of working towards humanitarian goals within the ideational combines of neoliberal global capital that seeks to instrumentalize and demonize everyone and everything.  

Kevin mentioned the "emotional violence" that the University is committing against Bang.Lab.  I could not agree more. The absolute and infinite reconstruction of universities from asylums (as Yiannis describes it) into a slick, numbing, deadly and deadening machinery of assessments, outcomes, metrics, evaluation, rigor, impact, external funding (see the incredibly lucid and penetrating posts of Amy, Brett, Nick, Micha, and Arthur) translates as institutionalized violence, racism, sexism, anti-queer, anti-intellectualism.  These strategies want to silence us all with quantitative data and budgetary controls. None of  us, wherever we are, at research one institutions in the US, at small colleges (that's where I usually teach), at European research institutes, at technology universities in the powerhouse economies of the New Asia, are exempt.  In very perrsonal terms, the UC systems aggression against Bang.Lab, Ricardo, Misha simply breaks my heart---I feel for all involved, the difficulties and anxieties and fatigue of political struggles, and the manufactured administrative ambiguities of the UC administrators, which in the end, is simply opening the seams of academic capital.  REDUX:  We are all Bang.Lab.

I've read all and reviewed 80 plus posts on this topic in one sitting, from my office here at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)in Singapore.  Outside my window, there is dense green jungle growth, carefully sculpted and shaped so it doesn't look too chaotic and forbidding. Intense green, plants that are houseplants in the US growing outside as though on steroids, oversized like characters from a Pixar animation. I share this because I have been trying to figure out in the last month what to contribute to this serious discussion about the situation of Bang.Lab--I've been working at NTU for the last four months, a major technological university in a country renowned for its innovations in information technology.  So in some ways, the situation at the US universities (where my institutional home is, at Ithaca College) seems remote at the moment.  So I have been somewhat reluctant to enter into this discussion, awed by the passion and brilliance of the contributors and postings in these pages.

As I think about the Transborder Immigration Tool, I am struck by two operational movements in the current theoretical/arts/activists/writing spheres internationally. The first is the move towards reverse engineering machinery, inventing new machinery, embracing the realm of the gadget rehabilitated for other purposes of connections and disruptions. I've seen a lot of this gadget-making art production here in Southeast Asia in various realms stretching from the activist to the innovation-for-monetization models.  I find it exciting--a significant shift from the media activisms and tactical media of earlier modes where so much emphasis was on the image itself. Now, it seems we are in the politics of the interfaces and the machine, and these are malleable, concrete objects merging tech and code in different amplifications.

The second move resides clearly in immigration and transborder issues. I'm not talking here about the academicized and washed out versions that create abstractions about hybridities and what not.  I see, instead, concrete, material disruptions and dislocations in global capital in the migrations and immigrations of people in all sorts of transversals.  The politically volatile and disruptive situation of racialized and gendered migrations and immimgration is not, of course, confined to the US/Mexico border.  Living here in Southeast Asia, I've observed a whole range of migrations, all disturbing and unsettling:  Filipino maids coming into Singapore for better wages, manufacturers descending on Indonesia to build sweatshops for Nikes on cheap labor, Indians leaving rural communities and moving to the IT boom cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad, IT manufacturers destroying rice paddies in Malaysia to build factories to build cell phones and netbooks, spurred by an aggressive IT policy, international faculty migrating to the Gulf States for higher wages and even jobs while there are none in the US, Malaysia offering cheap land on the beach and good tax breaks to US retirees, and IT development nearly everywhere you look in nearly every country completely and utterly reorganizing material life.  In Bangalore, a city which has quintupled in size in the last ten years due to IT, there are water shortages of epic proportions.  

Just last week, I attended a symposium here at NTU entitled IS ART PRACTICE RESEARCH?  Most of the presentations and discussions, a propos many of the ideas on Empyre this month, focused on how to get research grants (here, the grants are quite staggeringly large, as Singapore puts a lot of money into education to develop the country), how to get work to count for tenure, how to succeed, what is art, what is research.  Listening to all of this, I worried that research assessments (and to be fair, the US has pioneered all of this instrumentalizing assessment nonsense)have infiltrated the neurons of faculty--the discussion felt like people had drunk the kool-aid of productivity, wanting recognition and legitimation for their work. I sort of understand this---there are few jobs out there, anywhere, in any country of the globe.  Universities produce fear, and fear produces acquiescence and silence.  One NTU faculty member from the Art, Design, and Media school asserted that art schools are places of disruption.  I found his words sobering, as I wondered, in light of Bang.Lab controversy, how much disruption will be tolerated anymore in an atmosphere, as Rita, Joanne, and Sarah point out, of continuous assessment.  There is no longer any room for chaos, for time, for immersion--everything is oriented to productivity and career enhancement.  Perhaps I am being too harsh, not understanding the realities this new regime has produced for faculty entering the system, but what I see is a lot of insecurity, and a retreat from the big and the messy into the small and the contained--whether artistst or scholars. The system is bigger than any one professor or artist.

Here at NTU, and also at my home institution, Ithaca College, eery resonances emanate:  words like rigor, significance, excellence, innovation, words that are in many of the posts this month.  Globalization in full force, changing the DNA and biopolitic of universities into quantifiable, empirical models that install systems of control of ideas and interaction.  It scares me to think that innovation can be produced through a top down policy, whether in the US or Asia. I always considered innovation to come from outside institutions, emerging from contradictions and stalemates, not policies.  In this way, as we don either our wigs or our uniforms (thank you Marc and GH), we are all migrants, all immigrants, entering into service as maids and factory workers of the knowledge industries that need our services denuded of their politics and their urgency. As Rita so astutely pointed out, writing on tactical media counts, but acts of tactical media are perhaps more, uh, troubling.  I would expand this to say, for researchers and artists, survival in the regime of the metrics of global capital has meant a somewhat (for me, at leat) disturbing turn towards more and more abstraction. The further away one positions oneself away from humanitarian ideas, real human, migration and immigration, the safer one is, the better one's "metric."  Or, adopt the other strategy:  do work that is so minute and so specialized and so rationalized, noone cares. These strategies are intellectual prophylactics, cordon sanitaires. Neither these mega nor micro strategies of writing and art practice involve active engagement in complexity and debate with other humans across difference.  That is why the Transborder Immigration Tool is so threatening: it refuses to accept the macro or the micro and instead opts for the survival of live humans through technology mobilizing useful information.  It is its use value that threatens because it tries to repair the ripped seams of global capital where money and machines and date can move across borders but people seeking clean water, wages and food are violently tortured by either laws or officials or terrain.

To conclude this long rumination, spurred by such amazing, inventive, brillliant, and compelling posts that precede me and exceed me, everything we thought was political before, and everything we thought was art before and everything we thought was theory before the GEC (the acronym here in Southeast Asia for GLOBAL ECONOMIC COLLAPSE) perhaps needs recalibration. I agree with Nick:  we may have Obama, but the situation is still dire. Perhaps Obama is the new face of the new global capital, racialized, transversal, traversing, global, of America but  not, anti war but promoting war.

In his usual probing and laser sharp manner, Tim Murray contends that the university as an area for debate and conversation is now being threatened.  Yes. Yes. Yes.  Micha points out in many posts that multivalent, polyvocal collaborations like Bang.Lab threaten. Nick points out that rewiring software threatenes disruptions of students away from being slaves for Google and Facebook.  Many on this list underscore the contradictions of the new push towards interdisciplinarity, which in the end we intellectually agree with but may mean disbanding humanities departments and creating Wal-mart like full service Humanities centers.  

Let me end this overly long posting with an anecdote. Last fall, I was invited with Helen De Michiel to give a talk at a film theory congress connected with the Morelia International Film Festival.  Our talk described a large project we are working on, called The Open Space Project, looking at collaborative models for social media practice in new technologies, where people meet technology meet place, as we define open space ( a term utilized in the World Social Forum movements in India and Latin America, amongst other places not in the center of empire).  We discussed a range of social media and documentary/new media projects that highlighted performativity, collaboration, horizontality, contingency. The translation into Spanish while we were speaking was supplied by the US Embassy.

Afterwards, we were approached by two very likable, smart and engaging US embassy attaches.  They explained they were really interested in our ideas about open space and social media because "Hillary", their new boss, was now committed to exploring the possibilities of social media and new technologies after seeing what happened in Iran.  Hillary and the State Department were sponsoring a confab a few weeks later in Mexico City about social media, convening the likes of Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others Nick discussed to a conference with various youth groups across Mexico.  Social media, new technologies, and even disruptive technologies were viewed by Hillary, according to our inside sources, as a way to control destabilization, literally, get the youth off the streets away from the narcos and have them spend all their time in social media sites on their computers, contained, quieted, silenced except for status updates.  Some political NGOs across the globe decided to attend, to, as Marc might put it, wear the uniform and shift the conversation so that the entire discourse about social media (where social is not social but about social control and transforming active subjects into consumers of IT capital)was not just corporate or statist.  Not sure how much impact they had, but it does demonstrate the complexities and contradictions we are dealing with that are completely unresolved.

So, perhaps the way to end is to simply remind myself that we must always ground ourselves not in tenure, not in our careers, not in success, not in winning, but in struggle that connects us to real people across real divides.  Perhaps we need to dislocate ourselves from our rarefied and priveleged position in the heart of empire (as one Indian intellectual pointed out to me on a recent trip to Bangalore), and we need to join in solidarity with all the groups around the globe that are NOT in universities, not in the United States, not in think tanks, not in research labs, but are trying to create a vibrant, gutsy, civil society where people can interact and argue, places like JAAGA in Bangalore,Tactical technology Collective in the Phillipines, Documentation Center of Cambodia, House of Natural Fiber in Yogjakarta, Common Room in Bandung Indonesia, Asian Film Archive in Singapore, Center for Informal Education and Devleopment in Bangalore--the list is endless because these groups around the globe constantly work to make space, real space, for people, technologies, histories, and places to convene--and to disrupt.

Solidarity (forever) to Bang. Lab, may you win your struggle and may the UCSD be shamed and changed.  

WE ARE ALL BANG LAB.

Patty

-------
Patricia R. Zimmermann, Ph.D.
Professor, Cinema, Photography and Media Arts
Roy H. Park School of Communications
Codirector, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies
953 Danby Road
Ithaca College
Ithaca, New York 14850 USA
Office: +1 (607) 274 3431
FAX: +1 (607) 274 7078
http://faculty.ithaca.edu/patty/
http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff
BLOG: http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff10/blogs/open_spaces/
patty at ithaca.edu


---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 10:35:45 -0700
>From: empyre-bounces at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au (on behalf of micha cardenas <azdelslade at gmail.com>)
>Subject: [Spam:***** ] [-empyre-] Fwd: We stand in solidarity with Ricardo Dominguez as we	sit outside your interrogation  
>To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>
>   To SVC Burke and all involved in continuing the
>   investigations against Ricardo Dominguez and the
>   bang.lab,
>
>   As a member of the bang.lab and of the Electronic
>   Disturbance Theater (EDT), I want to make clear my
>   solidarity for Ricardo Dominguez and to denounce
>   your investigations against him.
>
>   It is egregious, and probably criminal, that you are
>   seeking criminal charges against him for the very
>   thing you hired him to do and gave him tenure for.
>
>   It is a violation of academic freedom for you to
>   have supported his virtual sit-ins against outside
>   actors such as the government of France and then to
>   react negatively to his virtual sit-in against the
>   UC administration.
>
>   As a member of the bang.lab and EDT, I am every bit
>   as guilty as Ricardo Dominguez is of organizing the
>   virtual sit-in. I am the system administrator. I
>   copied the files in place. I helped announce the
>   action, and I, among the thousands of others, joined
>   the action online.
>
>   It is clear to me, as it is to our thousands of
>   international supporters, that this investigation is
>   intended to silence dissent against the continuing
>   privitization of the university following the
>   neoliberal agenda, including tuition increases,
>   furloughs, pay cuts and firings.
>
>   The fact that you have endless funds to persecute
>   us, and send police after us, like the 3 police I am
>   looking at right now outside of Grant Kester’s
>   office this morning, demonstrates perfectly that
>   there is no budget crisis, only a crisis of
>   priorities.
>
>   You cannot stop us. If you succeed in removing
>   Ricardo’s tenure, you can be assured that virtual
>   sit-ins against your administration will spring up
>   all over the world. Electronic Civil Disobedience is
>   decentralized at its core. Penalties against Ricardo
>   will only make the situation worse for you. The
>   thousands of people who joined the action are each
>   capable of and likely to start their own virtual
>   sit-in.
>
>   Lecturer in Visual Arts and Critical Gender Studies
>   at UCSD,
>
>   micha cárdenas
>
>   --
>   micha cárdenas / azdel slade
>
>   Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, University of
>   California, San Diego
>   Artist/Researcher, UCSD Medical Education
>   Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net
>
>   blog: http://transreal.org
>________________
>_______________________________________________
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre