Blasting War on THING.Review

Blasting War
Text of a Paper Delivered at
Digital Terror: An International Workshop of Artists and Scholars
Sponsored by Ctheory Multimedia and the Rose Goldsen Lecture Series
Cornell University
September 21, 2002
by Patricia R. Zimmermann - 09/26/2002
THING.Reviews [columns]

http://bbs.thing.net

I want to thank Professor Tim Murray for inviting all of us to this Digital
Terror Workshop. It is an honor to be among artists and scholars who are,
together, working to interrupt the networks, codes, and representations of
war and terror to imagine that in some unknowable future, our work may not
be necessary. It is also wonderfully reassuring in these isolating, churning
times to undertake this session with my friend and comrade Professor Rebecca
Schneider. Thank you, Tim and the late Rose Goldsen, a tireless media
dissident, for convening us.

Mohsen Mahkmalbaf, one of the important lyrical film directors of the
Iranian new wave, published a powerful essay in Monthly Review last year
called The Limbs of No Body. He described the destruction of Afghanistan
over the last twenty years. The body of the world amputated Afghanistan. In
this time of digital terror, various email snooping and commercial digital
data mining technologies have been justified and mobilized by the USA
Patriot Act. The digital in this paranoid, authoritarian era is being used
to disembody and to disempower. Today, I want to turn this around to
reembody and reempower our politics, our analysis, our digitality, our
critical art. Therefore, we must resist any and all architectures of
disembodiment which remove labor from manufacturing in the global economy,
war from geography, privacy from security, gender from race, dissent from
justice. These ideas, and all of us gathered here today, are limbs of one
body, the phrase over the portal to the United Nations.

Our point of reference in this chaotic, endlessly morphing swirl of
phantasmatic nationalist discourse is quite simple: we are dead, or we are
alive. We must issue a call to humanity, not as some universalized
abstraction, but as a specific dialogic action across and with difference.
We must look to our humanity in and with others across the globe, and find
them human. And we must look to the dead, everywhere, not just here, and
forge connection. The people dead from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa each day
equal the dead of two September 11ths. We need to see, to really see, and
then to see more, through a digital viewing of all of the complicated,
messy, invisible politics that evades us. We can choose: we are limbs of no
body. Or we are limbs of one body.

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Don't Forget to Also Check Out:

"The Pinochet Case"
Directed and written by Patricio Guzman
First Run Icarus Films
110 min, 2001
Showing at Film Forum
September 11th - 24th, 2002
John Menick - 09/17
[media]

The Pleasure of Language
Text and art in the Netherlands
Media Art Institute/Montevideo/Time Based Arts
Keizersgracht 264, Amsterdam
August 24 - September 28, 2002
A review
Josephine Bosma - 09/05
[art]

http://bbs.thing.net