The Islamic Threat to Europe: By the Numbers: “The truth is that Islamists only carried out one out of the 498 terrorist attacks in the European Union in 2006” OK these are some engaging figures but written by a U.S. citizen – curious why there appears to be this incapability by many of the more aware citizens in the US of reflection – where are the comparative US figures?

orhestrated fear Look especially at the link: “Imagination Becomes Reality Part I: Expanded Paint Tools” at the work of Mathilde ter Heijne

The File Room Censorship Archive home page: “Muntadas” see his links. This site has been going since 2001.A temporary physical installation and a permanent, expandable database in the virtual, interactive and multimedia space of the internet and the world wide web, all of it referring to censorship – and to those of an artistic or cultural order specifically –, on a world scale and ranging from historic cases to those that are more incandescently current. This project, like others before Muntadas has developed throughout his career, brings with it in its execution, evolution and maintenance a collective spirit that is open to a public and a social space of dialogue, discussion and successive contributions, having been initiated by Muntadas in close cooperation with the team from the self-run artistic center Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, and with the support and collaboration of other organizations, collectives and individuals.In its materialization as a multimedia and three-dimensional sculptural installation the bureaucratic atmosphere of an archive is recreated, a bit sinister and rather somber, with the walls full of file cabinet drawers that increase the darkness of the enclosure, which is lit nonetheless by the terminals and monitors that allow the consultation in situ of the compiled computer archives. Archives are accessible moreover through the internet.(source: «Muntadas: Media Architecture Installations», anarachive number 1, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999.)

response to John McDonald: “‘Politics is an embarrassment in much contemporary art – an exercise in selling prepackaged opinions to the converted.” Gee John how original. We all know any attempt by an artist to engage in the ‘political’ can end up being cliched and glib … I personally have questioned in my art work wheter it possible to address political issues without resorting to pictorial cliches. BUT I think people end up seeing criticality in art as dead because they are willing to just go along with the system, and not think about broader issues There are limitations to what we can do (like introducing more enlightened legislation)but we still need to find ways to get what we feel into the public arena – outside the smaller circuits of ARIs for example…

Opening Australia’s borders: “fear & borders”

Virginia Perez-Rattun. She asks whether the empire really rule in the sense that we being part of any hegemony that we legitimate it both as citizens and as artists. Kind of interesting inversion of the regular discourses. Pity I didn’t get along to the conference.Virginia Pérez-Ratton is a ‘re-inventor’ of Central America; she has managed to bring together the different artistic terrains of this fragmented and isolated region and has generated a profile for it. With enormous tenacity she introduces artistic environments in and from the countries of Central America to each other and to the rest of the world. She is more than simply the director of TEOR/éTica; more than an independent curator and art critic who is in great demand: she is an ‘art activist’ who transgresses boundaries. Examines the place of art in a world that is deliberately polarised by the fear of terrorism. This is a collection of essays compiled from The Empires, Ruins + Networks conference, held in September 2004, which sets out to provoke a dialogue between art and politics. Perez-Rattun in her book Empires, Ruins and Networks -The Transcultural Agenda in Art states that the political responsibility of artists in a globalized society is debated in this collection of articles by authors from Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, and Scandinavia. Bemoaning the competition for tourist dollars among the world’s great cities and the commodification of cultural artifacts, these artists propose real and imagined places where art might resist capitalism, such as failed urban developments, among refugees, and in rural outposts.

Kurtz + CIA: “5000 foreign nationals detained”Why the US Justice Department is pursuing this case against an artist?Reflecting on paranoia and anti-terrorist legislation that looks like it will go swiftly through a compliant upper house – will that similar conditions that similar laws in the States have created.This article dicusses the implications of anti-terrorist laws in a climate of fear – none of he 5000 foreign nationals who detained were charged. Are we going down the same McCarthyist road?

what is the role of artists today?: “How can artists respond to a post 9/11 world where “critical discourse and civil liberties” have been subjected to increased levels of constraint? Can we create new models of artistic and cultural collaboration now that cultural difference has become the target of new types of surveillance and border control? Can art expand the democratic principles in public culture?” Damned if I know but everyone keeps asking it.

Beyond the (In)Security State: “The urge to be safe, to keep fear at bay, is certainly natural and understandable.But after more than half a century in a state of heightened national insecurity,Americans have largely forgotten the other side of the human coin: the urgeto be daring, to take chances that can lead to positive change. Insecurity isnow in the national bloodstream. That’s why anti-Bush campaigns that evoke fearcan be so successful. To be successful in the longer term, though, we have toconstrict that sense of insecurity, to return it to the more modest place whereit belongs, until actual security comes into sight.” (from t r u t h o u t – Ira Chernus)