Climatologists have confirmed it is now too late to avoid certain global warming and that a shift to a low or zero carbon economy is thus vital. This implies an urgent transition to renewable energy sources as well as radical adaptive measures, which collide against established industrial monopolies. This episode gathers several geoengineering patent applications, and through these documents presents the history of these emerging technologies and the private interests, actors, think tanks, and corporations behind them. Within the debate of climate change mitigation, geoengineering—the technological management of weather patterns and carbon capture processes—occupies an especially politicized place. It has slowly ...

A Euro Is A Euro Is A Euro: Fieldwork In European Realism appears in issue 2 of Fictional Journal (online only), and is reproduced in the PROPAGANDA pdf document. As a singular embodiment of matter and representation, the Euro-skulptur is as abstract as money, as tangible as cash. An essay and animations analyse the sculpture as a material symbol of the European Union. Euro cash is European Realism, it is a representation of things as they actually are, it is the sincere, un-idealised rendition of con- temporary life in the EU. we normally look at architecture, or more broadly at the built environment, ...

Ancestors and Algorithms appears online in Fictional Journal issue #2, and in the PROPAGANDA pdf document. In 2000, Dan Greaney, the writer of The Simpson’s cartoon, imagined Donald Trump as the president of the United States in the episode Bart to the Future, and he admits that the idea “was pitched because it was consistent with a vision of America going insane”1. The show creates an unimaginable scene, the embodiment of its viewer’s worst nightmare and hilarious fantasy that has since become reality…

It is the summer of 2013. Inside an empty news studio, a teleprompter rolls messages on its screen narrating the events that led to the closing of the Greek public television network (ERT) as a consequence of the European crisis and its austerity-ridden economy. It reads: “ERT may have been the last television channel to ever broadcast, the first and last television signal to be interrupted.” With the shutdown, 2,700 ERT employees were sacked. ERT’s ending was broadcast live, an its last report was an image of the people that had gathered outside the station, protesting against its closure. At the ...

City Rising from metahaven on Vimeo. This short video is about “the internet” and the global spread of affective, precarious labor, captured in the notion of love. It is also an homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys, architect of New Babylon. New Babylon was a utopian city for which Constant developed models, plans, and writings throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. New Babylon would give free reign to a life of play, as people would be liberated from the obligation to perform productive and manual labor. Models of New Babylon were filmed as bizarre, beautiful shapes in the foreground of the image. Now ...

The YouTube Commentary Project invites artist to reflect on existing videos NY based artists Nina Katchadourian comments on a freehand drawing of a perfect circle

West Africa’s Guinea-Bissau declared unilaterally independence in 1973 and was recognized internationally in 1975 along with the other former Portuguese colonies. Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Over Yet) is the title of a documentary film on the country’s post-independence left unfinished in 1980. Even in its fragmentary form, it is but one of several testimonies of a decade of militant cinema in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism, between 1963 and 1974, and the subsequent nation-building. The remains of this period of politically-engaged cinema, including finished and unfinished Guinean films, audio ...

Finding Fanon 2, made by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, uses the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. Finding Fanon 2 was commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

For An Oil Free Future is a mini-series of protest videos against fossil fuel prospection and extraction (oil and natural gas) off the Portuguese coast (offshore) and in land (onshore) through fracking. Synopsis: In a dystopian future in which oil extraction has become a catastrophic reality in Portugal, a citizen-journalist looks back and questions how it was possible to go ahead with such plans. Over the last few years, and particularly in 2015 under the former PSD/CDS-PP right-wing government, several contracts were signed between the Portuguese State and major oil companies (Galp, Partex, Repsol, Eni, Australis, Cosmos and the controversial Portfuel). The matter ...

This video of the Henderson House inspired me to get in touch with Mark Voelker to take a tour. The house was build by Girard Henderson (the former director of Avon) in 1978 and was a model residence for his company “Underground World Homes”. Voelker is part of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a group that purchased the Henderson House to entice High Net Worth individuals to sign up to be frozen. When he was showing me around the 15,200 square foot suburban luxury bunker, he explained that the only things they have added to the space are a demonstration ...

This episode, set within the context of inhabitants’s collaboration with Contour Biennale 8, weighs the fiction of allegorical images against the concept of the legal fictitious person. In particular, it puts in perspective the abstract body of Justice in relation to the status attributed to corporations for juridical purpose under the United States code of law. Set to the tone of feminist post-punk bands and composers, we draw on a recent US Supreme Court legal case that granted religious rights to a corporation called Hobby Lobby, which allowed it to deny its federal obligation to provide contraceptive healthcare to its female employees. ...

“If you see something, film it.” Citizen-shot footage distributed through social media has galvanized social movements, in the demand for transparency and accountability. As a political tool, such videos have reverted surveillance against itself, proposing instead a record that comes from below; in other words, a type of vigilance led by citizens against power and abuse, in what has been called “sousveillance”. Yet, beyond our newsfeeds, how does citizen-shot video actually become evidence? How does it perform in the courtroom? Do most of these videos have legal value? Images that have truth-value in the court of public opinion may not in reality ...