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On June 16, 2013 then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey held a National Will Rally. As he addressed tens of thousands supporters while, 10 km away, police forcibly removed protestors from Taksim’s Gezi Park where they had been peacefully protesting for more than two weeks. Erdogan told the crowd. “I understand that at this moment the world is watching us and listening to us” and then continued with this excerpt in which he presents “a photograph of Turkey.”
This is Amazon's "Participation Agreement."
Strange that it is called a “Participation Agreement”—which is almost never the case. More commonly they are called “terms of use” or “terms of service” (the shimmering between ‘use’, ‘service’ and ‘participation’ being of significance). It should be familiar to everyone—we “agree” to them all the time.
Political risk management is an expanding industry. One particular risk management company has, along these lines, produced “The Interactive Risk Map,” which you can now download to your smartphone. The layering of the various data into an historical cartography imparts, to users, concrete knowledge about “exposure.” It is the mediated interdependency of these layers that I wish to explore in my paper.
In late April of 2014, an amateur video of Israeli army aggression in the occupied West Bank began to circulate online. The content was neither new nor surprising: a soldier shoving, kicking and pointing his gun at unarmed Palestinian teenagers in Hebron’s old city. What was new, however, was the form and scale of the public response.
Scattered throughout the thirty million or so books digitized by Google, unexpected fingers erupt from the sequences of pages, captured by overhead cameras before the scanner has removed her hand. The rubber-tipped fingers have attracted a fascinated attention since the beginning of the project.
Internet Relay Chat, invented in 1989, is what I like to call the original social network. Considered primitive my today's standards, geeks and hackers all over the world still widely use IRC to congregate, socialize, organize, and labor.
These are two among the many VCDs produced in Indonesia in support of the jihadis who from May 2000 traveled to the Moluccas to back their fellow Muslims in what many saw as a battle against the islands’ Christianization.
In a number of neighborhoods across cities you find temporary chairs comprised of ordinary stone slabs placed on two bricks. These chairs are often used by daily wage laborers, old people or others looking for temporary rest.
Since the 1980s, many confraternities of the ‘Isāwa and Ḥamadša have videotaped their trance rituals on VHS and, more recently, on DVD. While ritual mediation work has always involved varying degrees of publicness, the extensive use of digital media has collapsed established strategies to distinguish different realms of practice. Emerging new publics trigger new transitions between exposure and concealment and spark new controversies on trance and Islam in Morocco and beyond.
This picture from 2013 shows a 123 ft. Shiva statue built in 2002 on India’s west coast, part of a new genre of monumental statues proliferating virally since the economic reforms of the 1990s.
In 2014, Sha Xin Wei established the Synthesis Center in Arizona to carry on and extend the work of the Topological Media Lab into the domains of architecture, urbanism, place and atmosphere, as well as more refined studies philosophical and scientific studies of temporality, rhythm and movement.
The Topological Media Lab which Sha Xin Wei established in 2001 to study gesture and movement from phenomenological as well as computational perspectives, has grown into a small atelier for transversal research at Concordia University in Montreal.