Tag: 1%

Out Now and Free! Special Issue: Blurring Digital Media Culture. Launch event

There is a blurry launch event at the University of Amsterdam on 25th May. We’ll be there in-person and online all afternoon. Full programme will be announced soon.

MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory

Special Issue: Blurring Digital Media Culture

Edited by Tony D. Sampson and Jernej Markelj

Vol. 4 | No. 1 | April 2023

The entire issue, along with individual articles, is now available for free download on MAST’s website at: https://www.mast-journal.org/vol-4-no-1-2023.

“The focus of this special issue—the potentials of the concept of the blur—might seem counterintuitive. Surely, there is a need to rethink how our perception of fact can be sharpened as a tool against the fake. Yet, we have asked media arts practitioners and theorists to consider the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological usefulness and application of the blur in the study of digital media culture. This is because we are interested in exploring the various ways in which porous boundaries and zones of indistinction can be creatively employed for dealing with the often dangerous intricacies of our networked existence, challenging rigid political, aesthetic, and technological categorizations. This does not mean that we necessarily reject the idea of making clear distinctions, but we are nonetheless keen to investigate different modes of empowering entanglements and blurrings that might surprisingly bring reality back into the mix without the baggage of categorical separability.”

Bank of England says Occupy was Right!

A couple of UK news sources are reporting this morning on a statement by a BoE Financial Policy Committee member, Andrew Haldane, which said that the Occupy movement was right to attack the global financial system.

This from the Financial Times (Hannah Kuchler)

“A member of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee has said the Occupy movement was right to attack the global financial system, in a speech to protesters in London on Monday evening.”

“Andrew Haldane said the Occupy movement – which started with protest camps on Wall Street and in the City of London last year – had helped persuade bank executives and policy makers that banks must behave in a more “moral” way.”

“Occupy has been successful in its efforts to popularise the problems of the global financial system for one very simple reason; they are right,” he said, in the speech entitled “Socially Useful Banking”.

“Picking up on the movement’s slogan of “we are the 99 per cent”, he said: “Occupy have touched a moral nerve in pointing to the growing inequities in the allocation of wealth and incomes globally. The 99 per cent certainly agrees. But so, more interestingly, do a high and rising share of the 1 per cent.”

“Mr Haldane said Occupy had played a role in bringing about the “most radical agenda of financial reform for 80 years”.

 

So do we all assume that everything is alright now, given that the 1%  have accepted culpability for unacceptable and growing economic and social inequities?

Interesting that neither the Financial Times nor the BBC reported on a response from Occupy.

Media power of this kind still belongs to those who can send messages without the irritation of receiving them.