ecopolis

PRESS RELEASE – THE BIG PLOT
New York, Berlin, Toronto, London, Moscow, 17 January 2009

http://www.thebigplot.net

It’s your worst neurosis of your life.
It’s the most meaningless conspiracy in history.
It’s a spy fiction about your intimate secrets and personal data over internet.

A story dispersed in more than seven cities, across several media platforms and among a cluster of actors who lead a tour in some of the most poignant sentiments of the human condition. The worst obsessions of your era and your hearts are transposed onto many stages, where degenerate souls with insatiable fixations are trying to give sense to their life.

Facebook – Youtube – Flicker – BlogSpot – Twitter – MySpace – Linkedin
This genetic modification of storytelling utilizes multiple forms of media and stages, which are recombined in order to immerse the spectator in a story of a real world. The fluid recombination of identities and of their interpersonal connections via several media in a non linear time line allows for Recombinant Fiction, a multi-platform, multi-channels and cross- media form of storytelling.

Love – espionage – sentiment – hate – politics – corruption – turmoil
are rendered in a form of fiction which doesn’t treat the spectator as a consumer, contemplating a completed piece of art in a tv-box, theatre or museum, but rather as something unfinished. The Big Plot is an immersive Recombinant Fiction, which needs an active investigation by an audience, who must follow clues in several stages in order to compile the whole story. So now you can take the responsibility of creating your own show !
The audience is sent on an intimate voyage into the secret lives of four bipolar characters, who struggle hopelessly with the planning of a big plot against their society.
Who knows what that plot is?
Which is the real plot?
Does it really exist?

Public actions – parades – civil disobediences – propaganda – conventions
it’s the most colorful revolution of the last political movement, it’s absolutely black. It’s the political movement. It claims revolutionary things and it does conservative things. Its adepts are right-wing but they think and act like leftists. It’s the triumph of the dictatorship of populism. It’s the glory of political stereotypes. It is against the meaningless of our era, but it’s the most nonsense ever thought of. This is psychopathic politics led by schizophrenic and maniacal people who have completely lost their sense of reality and their capacity for rational thought.

They are absolutely dangerous people. They want to obtain power with a plot, but they don’t know what that plot is – and it’s absolutely absurd. It sounds comic. But it’s tragic, because exploiting narratives is usual and necessary in order to fabricate and control political history and identity in the real world, if we can still call it real.
Where are the boundaries? Do they exist? Is it fiction that influences our world or does the real rule? This is the reason why The Big Plot is a meta-narration and a recursive story that will push the limits of narration and of reality as common idea. It is a story of stories because it discloses how reality is usually built by narrative codes, which combine to create a consensual truth. Engineering events and identities, and therefore reality, is a narration that is reconstructed and deconstructed through the art of language and storytelling.

The Big Plot is a nightmare under the effects of networking amphetamines, visions of your misery mirrored in the stories of defeatist fanatical people.

It’s the contemporary linguistic paradigm – a dizzyingly schizophrenic and dystopian vortex of useless communication that proceeds without any possibility of causing pragmatic change.

It’s the contemporary social paradigm – an implosion of sociality and explosion of intimacy. The personal privacy paradoxically exhibited as more important than common interests, loneliness and the collapse of public spheres under the glory of private life. Gossip wins over political fact, the ego over the world.

It’s the contemporary imagination – paranoia of conspiracy about private and public life as a dominant theme of everyday life. A constant search for the story behind the story distracts us from really listening to each other and seeing the world as it really is.

It’s the drama of an end of a love – an end of the love of trusting beliefs and moral integrity. A dead love. It’s the end of monolithic parties, beliefs and nihilism, which defined the last century.

It’s the final redemption – the peaceful reunion with the Global Conscience Revolution that is coming, after the disaster.

Project Supported by:
- Werkleitz Center for Media Art, Halle, Germany.
- SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage, London.

Created by:
http://www.paolocirio.net

As Sahab, the “press” agency of Al queda, produced an al Qaeda 9/11 anniversary video that has finally been released last week. They’re calling it “The Results of Seven Years of the Crusades” which meshes footage of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Yahya al Libi, with pre recorded material like the the “martyr video” of Ahmed Salah al-Ghamdi, one of 19 terrorists of 9.11.
It was little bit late for the anniversary video of 11.9 and people on the field suppose it can be connected to recent off-line position of major jihadi’s forums.

POETRY by Osama Bin Laden is to be published next week by an Oxford-educated academic, who has discovered that the world’s most hated terrorist was once in great demand as an after-dinner speaker.

Bin Laden’s recitals at wedding banquets and other feasts during the 1990s were recorded on tapes recovered from his compound in Afghanistan in 2001, after the September 11 attacks.

They have been studied by Professor Flagg Miller, who teaches Arabic poetry at the University of California, Davis. He said: “Bin Laden is a skilled poet with clever rhymes and meters, which was one reason why many people taped him and passed recordings around, like pop songs.”

via Timesonline.

Bruce Schneier started his annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest to create fear. The deadline was may 1st.
Here you can read the winners of editions 2006 and and go to read the text of the winner of 2007.

2006 winner: Tom Grant

Mission: Terrorize Americans. Neutralize American economy, make America feel completely vulnerable, and all Americans unsafe.

Scene 1: A rented van drives from Spokane, WA, to a remote setting in Idaho and loads up with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a couple of people dressed in fatigues.

Scene 2: Terrorists dressed in “delivery man” garb take over the UPS cargo depot at the Spokane, WA, airport. A van full of explosives is unloaded at the depot.

Scene 3: Terrorists dressed in “delivery man” garb take over the UPS cargo depot at the Kamloops, BC, airport. A van full of explosives is unloaded at the depot.

Scene 4: A van with mercenaries drives through the Idaho forests en route to an unknown destination. Receives cell communiqué that locations Alpha and Bravo are secured.

Scene 5: UPS cargo plane lands in Kamloops and is met at the depot by terrorists who overtake the plane and its crew. Explosives are loaded aboard the aircraft. The same scene plays out in Spokane moments later, and that plane is loaded with explosives. Two pilots board each of the cargo planes and ask for takeoff instructions as night falls across the West.

Scene 6: Two cargo jets go airborne from two separate locations. A van with four terrorists arrives at its destination, parked on an overlook ridge just after nightfall. They use infrared glasses to scope the target. The camera pans down and away from the van, exposing the target. Grand Coulee Dam. The cell phone rings and notification comes to the leader that “Nighthawks alpha and bravo have launched.”

Scene 7: Two radar operators in separate locations note with alarm that UPS cargo jets they have been tracking have dropped off the radar and may have crashed. Aboard each craft the pilots have turned off navigational radios and are flying on “manual” at low altitude. One heading South, one heading North.

Scene 8: Planes are closing in on the “target” and the rocket launcher crew goes to work. With precision they strike lookout and defense positions on the dam, then target the office structures below. As they finish, a cargo jet approaches from the North at high velocity, slamming into the back side of the dam just above the waterline and exploding, shuddering the earth. A large portion of the center-top of the dam is missing. Within seconds a cargo plane coming from the South slams into the front face of the dam, closer to the base, and explodes in a blinding flash, shuddering the earth. In moments, the dam begins to fail, and a final volley from four rocket launchers on the hill above helps break open the face of the dam. The 40-mile-long Lake Roosevelt begins to pour down the Columbia River Valley, uncontrolled. No warning is given to the dams downriver, other than the generation at G.C. is now offline.

Scene 9: Through the night, the surging wall of water roars down the Columbia waterway, overtopping dam after dam and gaining momentum (and huge amounts of water) along the way. The cities of Wenatchee and Kennewick are inundated and largely swept away. A van of renegades retreats to Northern Idaho to hide.

Scene 10: As day breaks in the West, there is no power from Seattle to Los Angeles. The Western power grid has failed. Commerce has ground to a halt west of the Rocky Mountains. Water is sweeping down the Columbia River gorge, threatening to overtop Bonneville dam and wipe out the large metro area of Portland, OR.

Scene 11: Bin Laden releases a video on Al Jazeera that claims victory over the Americans.

Scene 12: Pandemonium, as water sweeps into a panicked Portland, Oregon, washing all away in its path, and surging water well up the Willamette valley.

Scene 13: Washington situation room…little input is coming in from the West. Some military bases have emergency power and sat phones, and are reporting that the devastation of the dam infrastructure is complete. Seven major and five minor dams have been destroyed. Re-powering the West coast will take months, as connections from the Eastern grid will have to be made through the New Mexico Mountains.

Scene 14: Worst U.S. market crash in history. America’s GNP drops from the top of the charts to 20th worldwide. Exports and imports cease on the West coast. Martial law fails to control mass exodus from Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. as millions flee to the east. Gas shortages and vigilante mentality take their toll on the panicked populace. The West is “wild” once more. The East is overrun with millions seeking homes and employment.

MuslimSpace is a social networking site for Muslims that’s based in Espoo, Finland. According to Alexa they reach 145k users per week. The users come from around the world. The top three countries are Malaysia (18.5%), United States (13.6%) and Serbia and Montenegro (12.3%).

MuslimSpace is very much a MySpace clone especially when looking at the profile pages which feature all the same elements as MySpace. Besides the usual networking features the site also has blogs, photo galleries, groups, polls and forums, and even a Ramadan button to donate money to a charity marathon.

Like everywhere else in the online Muslim world, hijab is a big topic. MuslimSpace has, since its creation, had a rule forbidding women from posting pictures of themselves without “hijab” (in this case meaning headcovering).
Meanwhile the founder/admin Mohamed has stated that: “till further notice, modest pics even if non-hijabbed are allowed on the site.” A wonderful event, indeed, but somehow he manages to turn the allowance into an insult,” and he continues:
“MuslimSpace should reflect the true image of the real Ummah even if its not perfect. There is no use of acting all pious and hijabbed online, while the reality is different.”

The site was acquired by a company called Muxlim, that was established in Finland in 2006. Muxlim also runs other sites targeted to Muslims, notably IslamicTorrents.net and Muxlim.tv. Not hard to guess what those sites are related to…. They also feature an online version of the Quran and a Search for Muslim-related sites created with Google Custom Search. According to them there are currently 150M Muslims that use the internet and they hope that in a few years most of them will be using their services.

—->startupbin

A video interview with Richard Barbrook, presenting his new book Imaginary Futures, (Pluto Press, 2007).
And a long taped presentation of Richard Barbrooks, held at the net culture lab in Vienna, can be found on TAGR.TV.

Here the list of the chapters with some of the artwork realized by Alex Veness, complete list at the gallery.

Chapter 1: The Future Is What It Used To Be
Son of the Empire: Richard Barbrook as a Cub Scout of America, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 1965.

Chapter 2: The American Century
Here to Serve You: Robbie the Robot and Altaira from the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet.

Chapter 3: Cold War Computing
Moonstruck: Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, Astronaut John Glenn and the Aurora space shuttle from the 1968 movie 2001: a Space Odyssey.

Chapter 4: The Human Machine

Chapter 5: Cybernetic Supremacy
Working the System: Computer operator and IBM System/360 mainframe, 1964.

Chapter 6: The Global Village

Chapter 7: The Cold War Left

Chapter 8: The Chosen Few
Jazz Goes to College: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and a cocktail party in 1950s America.

Chapter 9: Free Workers In The Affluent Society

Chapter 10: The Prophets Of Post-Industrialism

Chapter 11: The American Road To The…

Chapter 12: The Leader Of The Free World

Chapter 13: The Great Game

Chapter 14: The American Invasion Of Vietnam
Bad Moon Rising: A Vietnamese People’s Militia member and her US Air Force prisoner in 1960s Vietnam.

Chapter 15: Those Who Forget The Future Are Condemned To Repeat It
Give It Up: dancers at the KCC sound system, Notting Hill Carnival, London, England, 1999.

Chapter 16: References

Blackwater USA is a private military company founded in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al Clark. It has alternatively been referred to as a security contractor or a mercenary organization by numerous reports in the international media. Blackwater is based in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where it operates a tactical training facility that it claims is the world’s largest. The company trains more than 40,000 people a year, from all the military services and a variety of other agencies. The company markets itself as being “the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Last week I subscribed myself to the Blackwater Newsletter, just to see what do they talk about and what do this kind of global private police thinks.

On september 16th Iraqi officials said 17 people, including women and children, were killed and 27 were wounded when Blackwater guards fired on motorists around Nusoor Square. The Iraqi investigation has concluded the shootings were an act of “premeditated murder” and recommended that Blackwater pay $8 million to families of each of the people killed.

Then Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked the U.S. State Department to “pull Blackwater out of Iraq”.
So these are not good times fot Balckwater, although they received more than 700 millions dollars in contracts from the governement, they decided to ask help to every american citizen, just yesterday arrived to me a really funny message that invites subscribers to make pression to the congress:

“While we can’t ask that each supporter do everything, Blackwater asks that everyone does something. Contact your lawmakers and tell them to stand by the truth. Correspondence should be polite and professional. We don’t support generating negative messages. Tell the Blackwater story and encourage your representatives to seek the truth instead of reading negative propaganda (?? 17 deads are negative propaganda??) and drawing the wrong conclusions.

Suggested themes:

- Cost efficiency of Blackwater – saving the US taxpayer millions of dollars so that the US Government doesn’t have to take troops from their missions or send more into harms way

- Professional population of service veterans and mature law enforcement personnel

- Sacrifice in lives lost by Blackwater saving US diplomats without one single protectee harmed

Expanding our communications effort starts with you. Pass the word – pass the truth.”…….

Angel_F @ DFIR Internet Governance Forum Rome 27th Sept 2007

On September 27th, in Rome, the Dialogue Forum on Internet Rights took place at the Protomoteca hall in the Campidoglio. This was an important meeting in preparation of the Internet Governance Forum, that will take place in Rio de Janeiro this November : the forum is an organization created inside the United Nations , born to continue the work begun at the World Summit on Information Society, and it adopted a form of multi-stakeholder collaborative dialogue suitable for the inclusion of governaments, civil society and enterprises to the dialogue.

On September 26th, one day before the conference, Angel_f, a young artificial intelligence, decided to offer his contribution to the international debate, registering on the online forum that was created to allow for the collection of all the points of view and to truly transform the decisional process of the conference into an open, accessible practice.

His message – the point of view of a young digital being, not really different in structure from the ones we interact with in our everyday life (search engines, google, banks, post offices, multinationals… ) – addressed ecological issues that are constantly excluded in the dialogues about innovation, perspectives on the public identity of human beings and on its materialization on the network, showing the multiple idiosyncrasies appearing in the social, political, anthropological and cultural systems of the human beings.

Furthermore, Angel_f noticed how technology enabled the viable alterntives, but that these are obfuscated from the perception of the members of the mass society, and they hardly can be integrated to it, because society doesn’t yet seem prepared to accept the changes brought on by the evolution/revolution that the information society represents.

Angel_f’s message was never published on the DFIR forum, just like the conference’s live audience was not allowed to autonomously videotape and document the event, but the complete text can be read online here:

A short report from the september 27th conference can be found at this address:

Angel_f’s message contained insights that were too important to leave unpublished: the text has been placed on hundreds of forums, mailing lists and blogs, obtaining a good media coverage, thanks to the tools offered by the collaborative web. Even more: the spontaneous interest of Guido Vetere allowed the whole story to arrive on the main webpage of the italian newspaper “il Sole 24 Ore“.

The DFIR conference organizers know about the existence of this young digital being, and of his message: they denied that Angel_f was ever registered on the forum, claiming that his message was merely sent to their own mailing list.

Luckily, we were able to contradict them, as we held proof of little Angel_f’s registration (and of the 2 sent messages) through this screenshot:

The DFIR’s responsibles know it, too, but Angel_f’s message still doesn’t show up.

Sign to have it published!

[W]e[W]ant[W]it!
[W]e[W]ant[W]ays!