Tumblelog
According to the New York Times (December 23, 2007), “tumblelog” is “a website or blog that is collection of brief links to, quotes from, or comments about things a person has encountered while web browsing. It is a sort of digital commonplace book.” Actually I thought that was what most blogs were–almost an annotated my del.icio.us. Anyway, methinks “Digitized Heart” is a tumblelog.
So here’s one encounter that I recently happened upon, courtesy of Nick Brown’s blog: The Radical Midwest Culture Corridor.
The RMCC includes folks from Indiana to Minnesota, including Illinois and Wisconsin. It seems like there are rich possibilities for connecting across the region and reinforcing each other with new ideas and energy. Hallelujah!
Malian Wanderings
Two friends just returned from Mali and another artist-acquaintance, Janet Goldner, just left for Mali. Since the last post was rather gloomy, I will move into the solstice with thoughts of Janet sharing art with Malians again. I first met Janet in 1990 in New York City at the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA). I saw her again at another WCA meeting, I can’t remember where. She’s had a thirty-year connection to Mali and does powerful metalwork masks and instrument-like objects.
Solstice remi
nds me of another artist I met also in NYC at the WCA,
Donna Henes. Donna does seasonal performances and collects stories of healing. I was particularly attracted to Donna’s work because of the locations she chose: lower Manhattan. She did one piece in the 1980s in front of Cass Gilbert’s Custom House, and also an autumn altar on lower Broadway…making the streets and public spaces sacred, animating them with light and fire.
Robot Warriors in Human Terrain
While I think the use of robots to clear minefields is a good idea–and the more the better; let’s get rid of all those land mines–this new development of placing robot warriors in Iraq is truly hair-raising. Supposedly they are “guided” by a human being studying images from the robot’s cameras; this person could be a half mile away. These one-meter-high machines are called SWORDS: Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems. I have an image now of all sides in a conflict fighting with SWORDS, and as long as human beings were not in the way, that might be worth the cost of the hardware ($200,000 per unit). Machines versus machines; skill in interpreting images; metal bashing metal, scraping sand, exploding wheels. But when people on their way to market, gathering for a wedding, walking to school, or running for their lives are put in the “picture” with these machines: who is accountable? what are the rules of the war? These robots take aim electronically and are more “accurate” than a human soldier because they are on a stable platform.
Piotr Adamczyk sent out a message a few weeks back about the Human Terrain System, another military-speak phrase meant to address cultural divides:
..."To help address these shortcomings in cultural knowledge andcapabilities, the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), a U.S. ArmyTraining and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) organization that supportsthe Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is overseeingthe creation of the Human Terrain System (HTS). This system is beingspecifically designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings atthe operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders anorganic capability to help understand and deal with 'human terrain'the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elementsof the people among whom a force is operating."
What have we wrought?
Take Back the Tech
Take Back the Tech is a campaign that started November 25 and ends December 10, which also happens to be Jane Addams Day. This is an effort to ask how to use information technologies to help prevent violence against women. But they also challenge ways that abusers use information technology–to track a woman, to harass someone online, and to post porn. The group behind this campaign, the Association of Progressive Communications, Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP), “is a global network of more than 175 women in over 55 countries promoting gender equality in the design, implementation, access and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and in the policy decisions and frameworks that regulate them.” There are interactive options on the site–like making a postcard or uploading a digital story–that invite people to share their own experiences. Betty’s story, the brief video available for viewing, is about her torture and abuse in Uganda as a teenager and the healing that she found afterwards.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
Andrea Smith, an organizer of INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, did a post-doc at UIUC a couple of years ago. Someone introduced her as a scholar-activist and she began by discounting that label. She said, we don’t say florist-activist or dentist-activist, why do we say scholar-activist? What about scholarship necessitates adding the noun activist if one is engaged in social justice work, for example? What was clear is that activism among scholars is rare enough that people find it remarkable.
INCITE! has a relatively new compilation, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, about the US non-profit sector, the “non-profit industrial complex.” Andrea Smith has an essay in it as does Ruth Gilmore.
