Under Fire <live>

UNDER FIRE <LIVE>:
A critical forum on the organization and representation of violence by Jord=
an Crandall
presented by Witte de With in collaboration with V2_Institute for the Unsta=
ble Media, Rotterdam.

<<full project decription and conference schedule below>>


Dear UNDER FIRE participants, friends and colleagues,

The UNDER FIRE conference will take place Saturday May 29th at the Witte de
With in Rotterdam. For those of you who have been participating in the
moderated discussions online over the past few months, and those who are
simply interested in the project and can not attend the conference in person
we invite you to actively participate online.

The event will be streamed live with an open IRC channel to enable your
direct remote participation. There will be a moderated chat throughout the
session so that your comments and questions can be included in the
discussion and the texted commentary of the chat will run onscreen during
the event.

We are very much interested in your opinions, critique and feedback, and
hope that you can join us from wherever you are at that day!

Saturday, May 29 | 15.00 - 19.00hrs CET, GMT +1 | Rotterdam |

WEBARCHIVE of the project at www.wdw.nl

STREAM and live IRC moderation via http://www.v2.nl/live/

We will hold a test stream/irc session between 16.00 and 17.00 (CET, GMT +1)
on www.v2.nl/live the day BEFORE the event (Friday May 28).

If you think you may be able to join us online, please drop me a brief line
beforehand.

Best regards, looking forward to having you with us,

Stephen Kovats

****************************************************
V2_Institute for the Unstable Media
www.v2.nl
t_ **31 10 206 7272
f_ **31 10 206 7271
e_ [email protected]
****************************************************



UNDER FIRE | MAY 29, 2004 | 15.00 - 19.00 CET (GMT +1)

UNDER FIRE explores the organization and representation of contemporary
armed conflict. The project consists of a series of presentations and
discussions that occur online, and live in Rotterdam. The discussions
involve participation from individuals working in politics, theory,
criticism, the arts, and journalism from both the West and the Middle East.
This first symposium bringing the together the lead participants in the
project, including John Armitage, Asef Bayat, Susan Buck-Morss, Brian
Holmes, Gema Martin Munoz and Loretta Napoleoni will be moderated by Jo=
rdan
Crandall.

The project explores the ways that armed violence materializes as act and
image, searching for new insight into its mechanisms and effects. In so
doing, it engages issues of economy, embodiment, symbolic meaning, and
affect. By delving into the economic underpinnings of contemporary armed
conflict UNDER FIRE scrutinises the legacy of the "military-industrial
complex," the rise of the privatized military industry, and the
repercussions of the commercialization of violence.

The project has been looking at contemporary conflicts as being driven by
combinations of territorial, market, and ideological imperatives, and new
attempts at the reconciliation of identity and universality. It looks to
emergent processes of organization that operate on multiple levels of
temporality and implicit form. Through this approach, UNDER FIRE aims to
articulate emergent systems of decentralized control and new global dynamics
of power. By building on historical concepts of hegemony, the project
attempts to understand the nature of emergent power and the forms of
resistance to it, and situating cycles of violence within the modalities of
a global system.


STREAM and live IRC moderation via http://www.v2.nl/live/
Online moderation by Stephen Kovats, V2_.


PROGRAM

15.00 - 15.10 welcome by Catherine David
15.10 - 15.30 introduction by Jordan Crandall
15.30 - 15.50 Brian Holmes
15.50 - 16.10 Asef Bayat
16.10 - 16.30 Susan Buck-Morss
16.30 - 17.00 discussion and live feedback

17.00 - 17.30 break

17.30 - 17.50 John Armitage
17.50 - 18.10 Loretta Napoleoni
18.10 - 18.30 Gema Martin Munoz
18.30 - 19.00 discussion and live feedback

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

John Armitage is Principal Lecturer in Politics and Media Studies at the
University of Northumbria, Newcastle (UK). He is the editor of Paul Virilio:
From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond (London/Thousand Oaks: Sage,
2000), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London/Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001),
and the co-editor, with Joanne Roberts, of Living with Cyberspace:
Technology and Society in the 21st Century (London/New York: Continuum,
2002). His writings have appeared in journals such as New Left Review,
Theory, Culture and Society and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities.


Asef Bayat is the Academic Director of the International Institute for the
Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and the ISIM Chair at the
University of Leiden. He has taught sociology and Middle East studies at the
American University in Cairo an has held visiting positions at the
University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University and the University
of Oxford. He is the author of Workers and Revolution in Iran (London: Zed
Books, 1987), and Street Politics: Poor People