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A Hackers Manifesto, verze 4.0, kapitola 4.

By samotar, 10 January 2023

Trnovou korunou a tankem do srdíčka

By samotar, 2 July 2022

Hakim Bey - Informační válka

By samotar, 26 March 2022

Václav Cílek: Záhada zpívající houby

By samotar, 15 February 2022

Guy Debord - Teorie dérive

By samotar, 21 January 2022

Jack Burnham – Systémová estetika

By samotar, 19 November 2021

Rána po ránech

By samotar, 23 May 2021

Na dohled od bronzového jezdce

By samotar, 4 March 2021

Zarchivu: Hůlna-kejdže

By samotar, 7 September 2020

Center for Land Use Interpretation

By samotar, 18 June 2020

Dawn Chorus Day - zvuky za svítání

By samotar, 30 April 2020

Z archivu: Krzysztof Wodiczko v DOXU

By samotar, 26 March 2020

Pavel Ctibor: Sahat zakázáno

By samotar, 22 September 2019

Emmanuel Lévinas: HEIDEGGER, GAGARIN A MY

By samotar, 19 September 2019

Tajemství spolupráce: Miloš Šejn

By samotar, 27 June 2018

Skolt Sámi Path to Climate Change Resilience

By samotar, 10 December 2017

Ohlédnutí/Revisited Soundworm Gathering

By samotař, 9 October 2017

Kleté krajiny

By samotar, 7 October 2017

Kinterova Jednotka a postnatura

By samotař, 15 September 2017

Upsych316a Universal Psychiatric Church

By Samotar, 6 July 2017

Za teorií poznání (radostný nekrolog), Bohuslav Blažek

By miloš vojtěchovský, 9 April 2017

On the Transmutation of Species

By miloš vojtěchovský, 27 March 2017

CYBERPOSITIVE, Sadie Plant a Nick Land

By samotař, 2 March 2017

Ivan Illich: Ticho jako obecní statek

By samotař, 18 February 2017

Thomas Berry:Ekozoická éra

By samotař, 8 December 2016

Best a Basta době uhelné

By samotař, 31 October 2016

Hledání hlasu řeky Bíliny

By samotař, 23 September 2016

Bratrstvo

By samotař, 1 September 2016

Anima Mundi Revisited

By miloš vojtěchovský, 28 June 2016

Simon A. Levin: The Evolution of Ecology

By samotař, 21 June 2016

Jan Hloušek: Uranové město

By samotař, 31 May 2016

Manifest The Dark Mountain Project

By Samotar, 3 May 2016

Pokus o popis jednoho zápasu

By samotar, 29 April 2016

Nothing worse or better can happen

By Ewa Jacobsson, 5 April 2016

Jared Diamond - Easter's End

By , 21 February 2016

W. H. Auden: Journey to Iceland

By , 9 February 2016

Jussi Parikka: The Earth

By Slawomír Uher, 8 February 2016

Co číhá za humny? neboli revoluce přítomnosti

By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 31 January 2016

Red Sky: The Eschatology of Trans

By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 19 January 2016

Towards an Anti-atlas of Borders

By , 20 December 2015

Pavel Mrkus - KINESIS, instalace Nejsvětější Salvátor

By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 6 December 2015

Tváře/Faces bez hranic/Sans Frontiers

By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 29 November 2015

Na Zemi vzhůru nohama

By Alena Kotzmannová, 17 October 2015

Upside-down on Earth

By Alena Kotzmannová, 17 October 2015

Images from Finnmark (Living Through the Landscape)

By Nicholas Norton, 12 October 2015

Czech Radio on Frontiers of Solitude

By Samotar, 10 October 2015

Langewiese and Newt or walking to Dlouhá louka

By Michal Kindernay, 7 October 2015

Notice in the Norwegian newspaper „Altaposten“

By Nicholas Norton, 5 October 2015

Interview with Ivar Smedstad

By Nicholas Norton, 5 October 2015

Iceland Expedition, Part 2

By Julia Martin, 4 October 2015

Closing at the Osek Monastery

By Michal Kindernay, 3 October 2015

Iceland Expedition, Part 1

By Julia Martin, 3 October 2015

Finnmarka a kopce / The Hills of Finnmark

By Vladimír Merta, 2 October 2015

Workshop with Radek Mikuláš/Dílna s Radkem Mikulášem

By Samotářka Dagmar, 26 September 2015

Já, Doly, Dolly a zemský ráj

By Samotar, 23 September 2015

Up to the Ore Mountains

By Michal, Dagmar a Helena Samotáři , 22 September 2015

Václav Cílek and the Sacred Landscape

By Samotář Michal, 22 September 2015

Picnic at the Ledvice waste pond

By Samotar, 19 September 2015

Above Jezeří Castle

By Samotar, 19 September 2015

Cancerous Land, part 3

By Tamás Sajó, 18 September 2015

Ledvice coal preparation plant

By Dominik Žižka, 18 September 2015

pod hladinou

By Dominik Žižka, 18 September 2015

Cancerous Land, part 2

By Tamás Sajó, 17 September 2015

Cancerous Land, part 1

By Tamás Sajó, 16 September 2015

Offroad trip

By Dominik Žižka, 16 September 2015

Ekologické limity a nutnost jejich prolomení

By Miloš Vojtěchovský, 16 September 2015

Lignite Clouds Sound Workshop: Days I and II

By Samotar, 15 September 2015

Walk from Mariánské Radčice

By Michal Kindernay, 12 September 2015

Mariánské Radčice and Libkovice

By Samotar, 11 September 2015

Most - Lake, Fish, algae bloom

By Samotar, 8 September 2015

Monday: Bílina open pit excursion

By Samotar, 7 September 2015

Duchcov II. - past and tomorrow

By Samotar, 6 September 2015

Duchcov II.

By Samotar, 6 September 2015

Arrival at Duchcov I.

By Samotar, 6 September 2015

Czech Republic

Towards an Anti-atlas of Borders

Christophe Sohn, Department of Urban development and Mobility, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

Conference, 13 april to 31 May 2016, Brussels

Coding and decoding borders at the dawn of the 21st century is an event encompassing art, research and practice. Combining an exhibition and an international conference, it will host, at the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and at the Headquarters of the World Customs Organization (WCO), researchers, artists and experts who will discuss the growing technologization of controls of persons, goods or capital which cross borders. As with the previous events organized by the antiAtlas of Borders, this conference/exhibition truly breaks away from compartmentalization of the fields of knowledge, creation and practice. By offering different levels of lecture and of participation, it opens up beyond academic, political and professional circles to reach the public at large.

At the beginning of the 21st Century, the functions of State borders have changed.  Borders do not just contain but also overflow spaces, districts and jurisdictions. Borders are losing their linear aspects and are becoming more mobile and more diffuse in order to adapt to globalisation. Actors managing border control have also substantially multiplied. In addition to states, new stakeholders such as agencies, corporations, and NGOs have emerged as actors of border management. The ways in which people’s mobility is controlled are more and more diversified and differentiated. People have to pass through multiple networks and identification devices. All these mutations have to be analyzed in detail, using a wide range of modes of expression and critical tools.

Border Changes in the 21st Century

The transformation of borders is intimately connected to the ways globalization has altered productive chains, communication and defense systems, work and culture. Neoliberalism has promoted national reforms that include fiscal austerity, free trade and labor flexibility, while promoting global agreements on taxes, banking and accounting standards. Freedom of mobility has been conceived through an economic perspective. At the same time, there are new strategies which aim at containing migratory pressures through the selective filtering of human flows.

From flow control to risk management

These transformations have resulted in a contradiction between economic practices that increase unequal global development and the need to implement sustainable and fair global development. There is also a geopolitical contradiction between national governments’ policies, which are limited by their sovereignty, and the need to regulate transnational processes through global governance frameworks. To address these contradictions, national governments have assigned state borders the function to guarantee people’s security in a world characterized by transnational mobility of people, capital, goods and ideas. In other words, borders are supposed to allow a high level of mobility while protecting against social, economic, political, and public health risks the mobility of people generate.

The role of borders as effective means of security has declined because of the difficulty to distinguish between internal and external origin of migrations, terrorism, economic and financial flows, software piracy and pollution. The lines between domestic and external security have become blurred to such extent that these domains are difficult to separate clearly. In this context, border control is conceived and implemented in a selective and individualized manner. The purpose of such control is not just to secure the national group in order to guarantee citizens’ well-being.  Instead, the aim of border control is also to securitize individuals themselves in order to perpetuate the political existence of a national society. Seen in terms of risks, human, commercial and information flows are becoming the targets of surveillance. Border control has become a form of risk management. Because these movements overflow the national space and cannot be circumscribed by it, securitization strategies are now conceived on a global scale.

The objective of border securitization is less to fully close these flows than to improve the mechanisms to filter them. Borders are functioning as firewalls; they aim to allow legitimate traffic and contain unwanted people perceived as both risks and threats. Borders could be very porous to capital, but not to workers with low levels of formal education. The implementation of this new logic of control has led to an unprecedented process of integration of surveillance systems, such as borderland devices, biometry, numeric and satellite networks, RFID, drones, robots, radars, CO2 detectors and all other objects used to detect, identify and follow the movement of human bodies. This process has gained popularity based on the notion that technological automation will improve border control by reducing costs and human error.

Mutations of borders and shifting forms of mobility

Keeping flows under surveillance today means that border controls managed by police, custom services and private companies get redeployed inside the national territory as well as projected inside other States’ territories. Customs may operate in foreign ports and airports. Visa checks are carried out in the country of migrants’ origin, not only in embassies but also in private offices. Simultaneously, check points are multiplied in order to track people and providers of goods who have managed to circumvent surveillance systems. Lastly, in order to exclude certain categories of flows, special zones such as detention centres, staging areas in airports, or free zones have been created on uncertain juridical basis. Such increasingly selective control implies a diversification of circulatory regimes: regimes regarding the circulation of goods are increasingly constituted by WTO agreements on tariffs and trade, whereas the circulation regimes affecting human flows get managed through more or less coercive migratory policies. Border crossing chances are determined by a complex set of factors such as professional status, gender, natioanl origins, ethno-religious stereotypes, economic and linguistic capacities, affiliations, etc. In the post 9/11 context, new operational dilemmas have emerged due to contradictions between the constraints of securitization imposed by efforts to prevent terorrism and the efforts required to safeguard the fluidity of global trade.

The main outcome is the generalization of negociated mobility based on contingent arbitration: creating the conditions for fluidity and interconnections implies increasingly sophisticated overriding clauses.  Major TNCs, for instance, bargain both accesses and tariffs. In this context, flagrant gaps between hyper-connected spaces or people and closed ones have emerged. The needs of people who are deprived of rights to circulate are cared for by an expanding humanitarian regime which goes further than basical asylum rights. NGOs take charge of « unwelcome » groups of migrants  considered as vulnerable. Depending on how well they fulfill the ‘true victim’ stereotype, in which the presentation of a suffering body becomes key to arouse compassion and solidarity, migrants are granted fundamental rights. However, since ever more restrictive policies frame global migrations, access to asylum and welfare rights has drawn a humanitarian boundary line throughout the world.

The sophistication of entrance regulations leads to an individualization of controls, particularly on the basis of biometric data. People who wish to bypass the biometric control systems are obliged to modify their physical aspect, notably by achieving mutilation and erasure of fingerprints.  Borders are now likely to be embedded in the person. Border management is embodied as it detaches from the territory. This means individualizing controls and biometric processing of borders.

Trespassing and diverting  the rules of the game

These changes are all the more complex as they involve multiple actors.  The companies and agencies who are mandated by national states to manage border surveillance have formed clusters of firms. The latter make money out of services that manage the mobility of humans, goods, and capitals.  Some specialise in assisting procurement of visas or fast track  work permits. Others, like consulting groups, optimize the means towards accelerated transborder freight. These groups build databases and provide global benchmarking for harbour logistics. As a result, control devices are set up to improve the power to control flows.

More informally, a high number of actors intercede in favour of modulated and moderated filtering, so that borders become more porous. Migratory traffic provide good examples of such arrangements. People smugglers have organized and have gained key positions in the system, as they can ease or obstruct entrance according to their own interests. They have become unofficial ‘regulation authorities’. Formal authorities cannot put an end to their networking and prefer to enlist them in fighting other forms of criminality. Thus, they incorporate informal networks to their own mechanisms of regulation and control.

WHY AN ANTIATLAS?

Atlases as map collections have instructed populations and delighted book lovers for centuries. Atlases are edifying objects. They provide a scientific representation of territorial divisions and a unifying glance at the world as a whole. Spatial sciences (topology, geometry, geography) have shown constant concern for sharp graphs and various scales. The history of border drawing consists of comings and goings between static and formal outlines and the fluidity of social experience. The instability of international relations has been benefic many geographers. Maps have always been political objects par excellence.  The process through which border lines have stabilized is directly related to their mutual recognition in treaties. Making an atlas of borders means to experiment stability or to give the illusion of it.  Setting the world in (right) order through maps is both a social and political process. So, why conceiving an antiatlas of borders ? Is it simply to create disorder?

A dynamic and critical approach

Our project may deceive both active partisans of order as well as internal enemies and partisans of disorder who look for innovative insights. Our project aims at a collective exploration. Talking about an anti-Atlas of borders first means that systematic graphic visualization of borders is not the most acceptable and desirable way of understanding borders. We do not contest the usefulness of maps as scientific tools, but the very idea that systematic compiling enlivened by comments may provide adequate knowledge of borders. Formal institutions are often in favour of geopolitical catalogues, insofar as this provides a synthetic vision of social and political relations. Such a titanic rendering of the world is less desirable to us than multiple investigations of complexity. Borders, beyond their topology, address ontological, morphological, sociological, anthropoligical and psychological issues – that is to say we shoud pay attention at the same time to their location, their mode of existence, their forms and shapes, their existing as social and mental facts,  etc. Postulating a territorial order is less interesting today than assessing how far borders are made of physical inertia, to what extent they are socially constructed – and from which mobilizations and demobilizations – how they materialize and dematerialize contextually, how we encounter them as evolving devices, how they function as launchpads for deterrioralized control and surveillance, how they work mechanically, electronically, biologically, how they condition exchanges, produce formal and informal rules, and finally more or less random outputs of what is legitime and what is not. What is at stake is thus to understand the border as a perpetually changing process rather than as a simple place. Atlases produce a static and stable synthesis while an antiatlas produces a dynamic and critical analysis.

From scientific exploration to artistic experimentation

Initially conceived as an exploratory research project, the antiAtlas of borders has become a performance in the artistic meaning of the word. The fact that researchers, professionals of border control, and artists have met each other for ten seminars between 2011 and 2013 has of course allowed them to enrich their own approach. In addition, this has also led to uncommon transdisciplinary experiences through which original works have reffered to borders as they are lived: this has been the case when producing video games and films on the basis of anthropoligical observations, when managing participative cartography, etc. Moreover, artistic works have provided many explorations and experiences of our ambivalent relation to borders – one one side, what they make of us, of our identity, of our intimacy, of our body, etc.; on the other side, what do we make of them, how we give them material and immaterial visibility or invisibility, how we play with them, either for freeing of them, or for surveying and denouncing our contemporaries. Tactic media as diversions of surveillance are spectacular manifestations of such an ambivalence. These pieces help us to keep some distance with the domination/resistance alternative. They show that the relations between the rationality of control initiatives and the practices that evade them are perpetually replayed.

Favouring a dialogue between art, science, and practice, does not mean promoting a new ‘doxa’ for border studies. We simply assume that transdisciplinarity generates cognitive gains made of quotations, transfers and exemplification. Any discipline at any time may function as a vehicle for another one. None of each specific knowledge is confronted to the collapse of its proper logic, but committed in new experiments,  with all the limits and benefits this may induce. This is the way the antiAtlas challenges our routines by pushing everyone for experimentation and taking completely different backgrounds into account.

From reality to virtuality

Approaching borders in the 21st Century supposes to perceive the transformations of spaces, both from space constitutencies and common experiences. This makes them a major element of our way to express how the world we live in can be represented, and what is our own position in it. Through processing the antiAtlas, we are trying to understand how people cross borders but also how borders modify their experience of space. New technologies of networked control settle spaces which are no more stretches but flows, loops, and interactions. These are virtual spaces, as the web spectacularly illustrates. The nation-state territory in its Westphalian meaning used to correspond to stretches, boundaries and marks. What is now humanly experienced, beyond this, is a daily life made of flows and networks. This addresses new questions to the way we conceive spaces, economically, culturally, and politically, and consequently our new experience of constructing social ties and communities. Communities are now provisional and shifting, they lay upon new alternatives and new forms of particpation, they do not encompass our whole lives any more. Such network forms imply a deep reconceptualization of the distinction between the public and the private sphere, the individual and the collective, the real and the virtual. To sum up, the main goal of this antiAtlas of borders is to understand the evolution of our political relation to space and to examine our common destiny.

Cédric Parizot – project coordinator, anthropologist, IMéRA, Institut de Recherche et d’Études sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (UMR 7310)
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary - geographer, Laboratoire Pacte (UMR 5194), Université J. Fourier, Grenoble
Antoine Vion – sociologist, AMU, Laboratoire d’Économie et de Sociologie du Travail (UMR 7317)
Gabriel Popescu – Geographer, Indiana University South Bend
Jean Cristofol – philosopher, École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence (ESAA)
Isabelle Arvers – Curator and producer
Nicola Mai – video performer, anthropologist, London Metropolitan University, Londres
Joana Moll – media artist
 
With the help of Ruben Hernandez-Leon for the English version
 
Aix en Provence, september 2013

Related

Frontiers of Solitude Symposium
The international symposium Frontiers of Solitude, organized as part of the eponymous art project site will offer a comparison of the opinions, experiences, and points of view of artists, curators, and invited guests on the theme of transitions in the landscape in which we currrently live and of which we are a part. The symposium will search for relationships between the cultural, political, and economic aspects of contemporary concepts and our understandings of what is meant by such words as Earth, countryside, landscape, and land, including the topography of transitional zones, with an eye on both establishing and crossing over boundaries and limitations. The term landscape can be understood as a mindset to orient us in the world and to reflect our relationship with the land. It is everywhere around us, under our feet; it is our shared starting point; it is that which at once unites and separates us. With this in mind, we can begin to raise questions about what is happening to the land? How are we connected to it, how do we relate to it, what separates us from it? How and to what extent can we understand the land, and what do we all know and not know about it? To whom does it belong, and how do we change it, for better or worse? The artist, architect, businessman, technician, scientist, farmer, pilgrim and other kind of specialist each perceive the landscape in their own terms. How can we express and capture in human, rather than statistical, terms, both the visible and invisible transformations that the land undergoes, both locally and globally, with regard to the entire biosphere and climate? Industrialization brings about mobility of people and goods, hyper-connectivity, overproduction and urbanization, which have transformed a large part of the 21st-century landscape into an industrial concourse, test laboratory, and a field of conflict among people, and between people and other living creatures. From this, there comes about a blurring of existing, seemingly well-defined borders, zones both separate and interconnected, with regions of safety and danger, rich and poor, managed and wild. Have we already entered an ideosphere of beyond imaginary boundaries? Does contemporary art make it possible to orient ourselves within this unstable and ever-changing territory? Do frequent art projects and festivals, or interdisciplinary symposia on the theme of the Anthropocene offer fresh approaches and visions, or rather exploit the fascination and anxiety as result of the expected and unexpectied changes and transformations? Guests and participants: Vít Bohal, Dustin Breitling, Peter Cusack, Petr Gibas,Stanislav Komárek, Alena Kotzmannová, Ivar Smedstad, Julia Martin, Pavel Mrkus, Ivo Přikryl, Martin Říha, Matěj Spurný, Tereza Stöckelová, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Andras Heszky (Translocal Institute), Guy van Belle, Martin Škabraha. Information: info@frontiers-of-solitude.org. Organizers and concept: Miloš Vojtěchovský, Dagmar Šubrtová, Dustin Breitling. This event takes place and is organized in collaboration of the French Institute in Prague and the support of the Agosto Foundation. program of the symposium Program Location: French Institut Prague, Štěpánská 35 Praha 1 Friday 5 February 10:00 Registration The first block of presentations consists of the outcomes from the expeditions to Iceland, north Bohemia and FInnmark during late summer of last year as part of the project. Participants will talk about their experiences and thoughts about the journeys. Alena Kotzmanová and Ivar Smedstad will present the Finnmark expedition, Julia Martin and Pavel Mrkus wlll talk about the landscape and industry in Iceland, and Peter Cusack, workshop lecturer for Into the Abyss of Lignite Clouds at the Most coal fields, will speak about his ongoing research into the sonic aspects of environmentaly damaged places and landcapes. 10:30 Miloš Vojtěchovský and Dagmar Šubrtová (CZ) - Welcome and introduction 1.Reports Beyond the Frontiers
 10:45 Alena Kotzmannová (CZ) -North 11:00 Ivar Smedstad (NO) - Finnmark 11:30 Julia Martin (IS/D) - The Iceland expedition:Tracing hyperextended objects and their ecological agency 12:00 Pavel Mrkus (CZ) - About "The Fall" 12:15 Peter Cusack (UK) - Sonic Journalism and Places in Transition 12:45 Discussion 13:00 - 14:00 Lunch 2. Landscapes, Gardens, Mines, Dwellings, Voids 
 The afternoon block covers different aspects of current environmental issues, and in particular, there will be presented a case study of the industrial landscape around the Most basin in north Bohemia. 14:00 Stanislav Komárek (CZ) – Having a Land, Having a Garden 14:30 Martin Říha (CZ) - The Limits of Adaptation -The Men and The Ore Mountains Landscape 15:00 Ivo Přikryl (CZ) - Hydrological System of Landscape after Mining - Ideal and Reality 15:30 Matěj Spurný (CZ) - “We didn’t have the Numbers” The Dawn of Criticism of Socialist Productivism in North Bohemia in the 1960s as a Case Study 16:00 Petr Gibas (CZ) - Voids: The Landscape between presence and absence 16:30 Discussion Break - 17:00 - 19:00 19:15 Introduction to the film 19:30 Screening of Dreamland Saturday 6 February 3. Anthropo-Scenes -- The morning block focuses on the broader contexts of the industrial and post-industrial landscape, related to the current discourse on the Anthropocene. 11:00 Martin Škabraha (CZ) - Reclaiming the Landscape 11:30 Dustin Breitling (CZ/USA) - Cognitive Mapping 12:00 Tereza Stöckelová (CZ) - Ontological Uncertainty in the Planetary Lab 12:30 Vít Bohal (CZ) - The Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Lunch break - 13:00 to 14:00 4. Places in Between: in the last block, presentations will offer three examples of how contemporary art and artists reflect the environmental crisis, and the questions of their vision of the future with the closing discussion panel. 14:30 Guy van Belle (B/CZ) - An Ecological Awareness, Crossing Borders between the Real and Imagined? 15:00 András Heszky (HUN) (Translocal institute, Budapest) - The River School and the Ecology of Danube 15.30 Isabelle Frémeaux & John Jordan (FRA/UK) (The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination) - Places in Between 16:00 Panel discussion 17:00 - 19:00 Break 19:00 Screening of The Forgotten Space. (Allan Sekula and Noel Burch) …