NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Saving Net Neutrality

via the Center for Digital Democracy :

Open Access
During the days of the slow, dial-up modem, the Internet--because it ran over telephone wires--was regulated by telephone's common-carrier rules: a network is required by law to be open to all communications traffic, and to treat all information in a fair and non-discriminatory fashion.

These were the rules that formed the foundation for a new media capable of producing the most diverse content in the history of mass communication. These were the rules that allowed the birth of nearly 7,000 Internet service providers (ISPs), as well as millions of Web sites of every conceivable variety.

But these rules that protected open access and the democratic architecture of the dial-up Internet do not apply to cable and satellite high-speed (broadband) Web access. And telecom companies are lobbying hard on Capitol Hill for deregulation to end their open access requirements.

An Internet without open access requirements would hardly resemble the Internet as we know it today. Without such requirements, the power to discriminate would be given to those who control the conduit--the few gigantic service providers that will remain. They would have gatekeeper status--the ability to dictate whether content gets to the user via the fast lane or the slow lane. It is a near certainty that the faster service would be given to the affiliated content within the "walled gardens" (the first portal that the user is taken to), while nonaffiliated content outside the walls would be left with slower speeds and poorer service.

Such an Internet would more closely resemble the limited choice of cable television rather than the varied options of the World Wide Web. Nonprofit groups, public interest coalitions, and independent artists (to name just a few) would be relegated to second-class status, leaving the Net in the hands of corporate interests.

more via MoveOn.org (thanks Amy!):

Do you buy books online, use Google, or download to an Ipod? These activities will be hurt if Congress passes a radical law that gives giant corporations more control over the Internet.

Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. Amazon.com doesn't have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.

Politicians don't think we are paying attention to this issue. Many of them take campaign checks from big telecom companies and are on the verge of selling out to people like AT&T's CEO, who openly says, "The internet can't be free."

The free and open Internet is under seige--can you sign this petition letting your member of Congress know you support preserving Network Neutrality? Click here:

http://www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet

A list of all the ways you might be affected by Net Neutrality is located on the bottom of this link: http://civic.moveon.org/alerts/savetheinternet.html

Sources:

1. "Telecommunication Policy Proposed by Congress Must Recognize Internet Neutrality," Letter to Senate leaders, March 23, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1653

2. "AOL Blocks Critics' E-Mails," Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1649

3. "B.C. Civil Liberties Association Denounces Blocking of Website by Telus," British Columbia Civil Liberties Association Statement, July 27, 2005
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1650

4. "At SBC, It's All About 'Scale and Scope," BusinessWeek, November 7, 2002
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1648

5. "Net Losses," New Yorker, March 20, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=1646

6. "Don't undercut Internet access," San Francisco Chronicle editorial, April 17, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=164

When Artists Say 'WE': screening recent work in film and video

SCREENING: APRIL 22 4:30PM
ARTISTS SPACE
38 Greene Street NYC
As part of the exhibition,
When Artists Say 'WE'

ANNEMARIE JACIR, EMILY JACIR, JOHN MENICK, JENNY PERLIN
present recent work in film and video

Program:

Associated
Jenny Perlin
16mm, b/w, sound, 12:25, 2006
Filmed at my neighborhood corner store, a former Associated
supermarket, from opening to closing on July 4, 2004 (Independence Day, U.S.). One roll of 16mm film shot every two hours or so reveals little except the unchanging patterns of the 14 hour workday. Interview with owner Charles Leem reflects on the history of his store and his favorite musicians

like twenty impossibles
Annemarie Jacir
35mm, color, 17 mins (2003).
Occupied Palestine: A serene landscape now pockmarked by military checkpoints. When a Palestinian film crew decides to avert a closed checkpoint by taking a remote side road, the political landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. Both a visual poem and a narrative, like twenty impossibles wryly questions artistic responsibility and the politics of filmmaking, while speaking to the fragmentation of a people.

Occupation
John Menick
Color, 24p DV, Stereo, 21 min, 2006
"Occupation" is a short narrative portrait of Malik, a homeless Senegalese postcard salesman living in Aubervilliers, France. Malik lives out of his car; his existence has hardened into a circular routine of urban exploration by night and the selling of his self-made postcards by day. The cards are the result of his travels through the peripheral spaces of the Aubervilliers. Avoiding typical touristic cityscapes, Malik's postcards focus on highway overpasses, disused factories, and housing projects. The film shows one day and night in Malik's life, a life that is both entangled with his host city and permanently pushed to its margins.

Robert Frenay's Pulse

Check out Robert Frenay's new book Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things in bookstores and online via www.pulsethebook.com -- a cool endeavor in the way the text is being dynamically structured online.


via the publisher [@ Powell's]:

Pulse is not about dance music, not about heart rates—and not about electromagnetic fields. What it does describe is a sea change in human affairs, a vast and fundamental shift that is about to transform every aspect of our lives. [...] Pulse shows how ideas that have shaped Western science, industry, and culture for centuries are being displaced by the rapid and dramatic rise of a "new biology"—by human systems and machines that work like living things.

[etc]

The State of Things: A Temporary Sculpture

"The State of Things"
A Temporary Sculpture Marking the Third Year of the Iraq War

Saturday, April 22, 2006, 12 Noon - 8 PM
One Day Only

POSTPONED! due to inclement weather on the 22nd!

THE EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE
Saturday, April 29, 2006, 12 Noon - 8 PM
One Day Only

Ligorano/Reese
present an ice sculpture
of the word "Democracy"

in the garden of

Jim Kempner Fine Art
501 West 23 Street, NY, NY 10001
Entrance on 10th Avenue

For more information, phone 212 206-6872

Ice sculpture provided by Okamoto Studio

Phone for rain date 212 206-6872

Amy Sillman: Funky grandeur in unlikely oranges and strange green...

Amy Sillman: The Elephant in the Room (2006)
Oil on canvas; 80 x 69 inches. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

via Tyler Green @ MAN, April 18, 2006 :

Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins: Amy Sillman is making the best paintings of her career, the kind of paintings that don't demand attention, but earn it. Her palette is vaguely Diebenkornian, full of sunny blues, unlikely oranges and a purple that seems somehow Morrocan. She uses a strange green that I last saw in Max Ernst, particularly in Celebes. (The painting at left, The Elephant in the Room, seems to share a palette -- and a trunk -- with Ernst's painting.) Sillman is not afraid of color, or, more specifically, Sillman is not afraid of many colors and how they may work together.

Her compositions are precise. They reveal neither landscape nor anything beyond the most grotesquely figurative. The use empty canvas the way a film uses James Cromwell, a character actor who can hold his own -- or simply fill space. 

But mostly Sillman has made abstract paintings that attract your eye and keep it on her canvas. You follow her lines to color, her color to lines, is that a splash of red over there? Why? And what on earth is gray doing here? Put another way: Sillman's paintings are mature understandings of how color and form work together to hold interest.

This is no accident. Amy Sillman graduated from college 33 years ago. She earned her BFA six years later, and her MFA 22 years later. She did not have her first solo show in a New York gallery until 1991. Pay attention to this biography MFA star-kids, pay attention.