Challenging the privatised university

Some scary frights, nuggets and treasures encountered at this event:

 

Through a Glass Darkly

 

Raewyn Connell’s piece for The Conversation (check the links also, especially this one).

 

A Communiqué from an Absent Future

and

Brisbane Free University

zombies and math

via… science.org.au

Judy-anne Osborn is a mathematician interested in education, employed as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Judy-anne did her undergraduate (first class hons) and PhD at the University of Melbourne, where she joined ARC Centre of Excellence “Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems”. Dr Osborn then joined the Mathematical Sciences Institute at ANU as a postdoctoral fellow, followed by a stint as a postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle in the University’s Priority Centre CARMA (Computer Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications) before taking up her present position. Judy-anne has a long-term interest in the notion of mathematics as an exploratory game. This notion influences both her research in combinatorics and her teaching. Dr Osborn has had a number of publications in well-regarded mathematical journals as well as several teaching-related grants, including leading the Newcastle node of a current OLT grant to improve the training of mathematics teachers.

Brad Pitt’s zombie-attack movie “World War Z” may not seem like a natural jumping-off point for a discussion of mathematics or science, but in fact it was my review of that movie in “The Conversation” that led me here.

The Movies and Maths have something in common. Both enable a trait which seems to be more highly developed in humans than in any other species, with profound consequences: the desire and capacity to explore possibility-space.

The same mathematical models can let us playfully explore how an outbreak of zombie-ism might play out, or how an outbreak of an infectious disease like measles would spread, depending, in part, on what choices we make. Where a movie gives us deep insight into one possibility, mathematics enables us to explore, at all once, millions of scenarios, and see where the critical differences lie.

When:	Tuesday 4 March 2014 Refreshments from 5.30 pm Talk and live streaming from 6 pm – 7 pm (http://www.science.org.au/livestream/)
Where:	Shine Dome, Gordon Street, Canberra View map
Cost:	$6 entry fee
Contact:	Bookings essential – Purchase tickets here Further information please contact the Events Team. Email: events@science.org.au  Phone: 02 6201 9462 Fax: 02 6201 9494

Student (dis)engagement & top-down structures.

Student (dis)engagement & top-down structures..

 

Punkademics

via the MeCCSA mailing list

Punkademics

Edited by Zack Furness

PDF available freely online (http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=436).
The basement show in the ivory tower…

In the thirty years since Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the seemingly antithetical worlds of punk rock and academia have converged in some rather interesting, if not peculiar, ways. A once marginal subculture documented in homemade ‘zines and three chord songs has become fodder for dozens of scholarly articles, books, PhD dissertations, and conversations amongst well-mannered conference panelists. At the same time, the academic ranks have been increasingly infiltrated by professors and graduate students whose educations began not in the classroom, but in the lyric sheets of 7” records and the cramped confines of all-ages shows.

Punkademics explores these varied intersections by giving voice to some of the people who arguably best understand the odd bedfellows of punk and academia. In addition to being one of the first edited collections of scholarly work on punk, it is a timely book that features original essays, interviews, and select reprints from notable writers, musicians, visual artists, and emerging talents who actively cut & paste the boundaries between punk culture, politics, and higher education.
Contributors: Milo J. Aukerman, Maria Elena Buszek, Zack Furness,
Alastair Gordon, Ross Haenfler, Curry Malott, Dylan AT Miner, Ryan
Moore, Tavia Nyong’o, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Alan O’Connor, Waleed Rashidi,
Helen L. Reddington, Stevphen Shukaitis, Michael Siciliano, Rubén
Ortiz-Torres, Estrella Torrez, Daniel S. Traber, and Brian Tucker.

“The worlds of punk and academia are deliberately dichotomous: the ‘cred’ of the former become ‘certified credentials’ when you enter the latter. This important exploration of the space between the two is weird, uncomfortable, and fraught with mistakes. And we don’t give a fuck if you don’t like it.” – Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity and former editor, Punk Planet

“Zack Furness and his nerdy bunch impressively reveal how the alternative tentacles of youthful rebellion are infiltrating and disrupting the predictable routines of the academy.” – Craig O’Hara,author of The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise UK release event June 7th in Brighton:
http://www.facebook.com/events/387680207937772/

Book information site: http://www.punkademics.com/

Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
www.minorcompositions.info |minorcompositions@gmail.com

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In Media Red this week ‘The Walking Dead’

This week’s In Media Res theme focus is The Walking Dead:
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/

Too Late: a zombie short film

Zombietastic movie reviews

Zombie movie reviews archive, not movie reviews by zombies.

Juan of the Dead: Cuban Zombie Movie

Zombie Media

Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka’s ‘Zombie Media‘ project proposes media archaeology as an art practice, merging two of this writer’s obsessions: zombies and technological obsolescence (recently refreshed from watching an endless line of on CRT TVs emerge on the suburban streets of East Melbourne awaiting the annual council pickup).

Hertz and Parikka look to the life after death of old new media, both its reuse and its refusal to go away. They consider ‘Zombie Media’ as the living dead of media history, where the discarded waste of old new media that is of inspirational value to artists but also the real death of nature due to its ongoing toxicity.

The project has five main points:

1. Opposition to dead media. Media never dies, it decays and rots, and is reformed and remixed but always “stays as a residue in the soil”.

2. Opposition to planned obsolescence, which is an “unsupportable death drive” in the political media consumption and media ecology of the circulation of desires.

3. Depunctualisation of media, by promoting the open hacking and understanding of ‘black box’ systems.

4. Media archaeology as artistic methodology – the remixing of technology from textual material to material methodology

5. Reuse is an important dynamic of contemporary culture, an open and remix culture should be extended to physical artifacts.

Points 1., 2., and 4. are crucial to the revolutionary significance of points 3. and 5., and points to an everyday practice that goes beyond the reuse of obsolescent technologies in visual art and music production.

The term ‘black boxing’ refers the methods used to obscure the inner workings of information and communication technologies. Black boxing is often layered and a result of an interaction of multiple black boxes hidden before the user in their devices that enforce the incomprehensibility of technologies. Yet no black box is perfect, and this is where Hertz and Parrikka are let down somewhat by the focus on the “scientific gaze on the circuits of technology”. They do indicate the importance of following the circuits of technology beyond the immediate technical ones, but the overall focus in the project presentation is on hardware: “media archaeology is material, monumental’ and the expression of the technology and not its historical narrative. This approach needs to expand to survey of circuits to account for ‘soft’ technologies that govern the hardware; the production of code that has just as much significance on the life after death of new media technologies, and impact on ecologies of use and nature as the mineral politics and disposable designs of the hardware engineers.

Soft technologies, include software but also refer to the legal technologies like federal laws and intellectual property (including patents, trade secrets and copyrights) that are are necromantic: they enforce one type of enlivened death – the movement of new media to old refuse, but also stop the individual from resurrecting old new media to serve as a zombie beyond the confines of the obsolescence cycle. Digital Rights Management (DRM) software and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions are just are reprehensible as non-rechargeable batteries, built-in defects, and cases that won’t allow the user to crack them open and tinker with what is inside. Zombie media is a bifurcated zombie – the horror of its toxicity as a living environmental death but also the promise of its life after death – and the everyday consumer needs to be empowered as the Voodoo Master over their undead slaves.

Remix and reuse should be more than art practice, hardware hacking and the reusing and reintroducing dead media into new cycles of life, new constructions and new iterations in the everyday should be the goal of the Zombie Media project – one that takes it’s lead from art practice, but integrated in the everyday practices of the home, school, the office and the street.