Surveillance: CTRL [SPACE]

Interesting book if I had a hundred bucks:

CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, this timely catalog of the emerging genre of surveillance art is the first to compile critical essays discussing the history of surveillance, dating from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in 1787 to the present. The catalog includes many well-known Western artists and offers exposure to some who are lesser known. Curator and coeditor Levin has gathered a mixture of important original and previously published essays by some of the most respected postmodern theorists in this collection, among them Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Victor Burgin, and Slavoj Zizek. The layout mirrors the sensibility of the exhibit but is distracting, with overlapping type that can actually make reading the book difficult. This mammoth catalog includes biographies of the artists and authors, 950 illustrations (350 in color), and an exhibition checklist.

(Please) Don’t Blame Mexico-update on Michel Foucault EP!

Indie Rock magazine provides an update on (Please) Don’t Blame Mexico’s new EP Michel Foucault.

Rabbit : Tiens, et si tu nous présentais un peu Michel Foucault, pour commencer ? En quoi t’a-t-il influencé pour ce nouvel EP ?

Maxime : J’ai “rencontré” Michel Foucault en prépa, car notre programme était très axé philosophie politique et son discours sur les rapports entre individus, les rapports de force, de domination, de pouvoir, c’est vraiment quelque chose qui m’a frappé, bouleversé et qui, en même temps, était totalement absent de la philosophie telle qu’on nous l’enseignait au lycée. A mon arrivée à Paris, j’étais un peu perdu, j’avais besoin de me raccrocher à quelque chose de fort, à quelque chose qui me renverse. Des choses comme “Il faut défendre la société” font partie de celles que j’emmènerais sur une île déserte, tant c’est passionnant. Quant à son influence sur PDBM, elle est archi-minime. C’est peut-être seulement que j’avais envie de rendre hommage à cette période de ma vie où il m’a vraiment “aidé”, et peut-être que le morceau auquel il donne son nom m’inspirait ce genre de sentiment.

Also: Revealed! Where they get their name from:

“Oh no, don’t blame Mexico” chantait Paddy McAloon sur Swoon, le premier album des regrettés Prefab Sprout. La chanson s’appelait “Don’t Sing”. Heureusement, Maxime Chamoux n’a pas suivi ce conseil et n’a gardé que cette phrase mystérieuse et aussi une certaine idée de la pop au moment de fonder son groupe.

Heterotopia art exhibition

The notion of heterotopia continues to inspire new thinking and art, despite the seeming problems of the piece, which I’ve outlined here before.

“Heterotopias” is an exhibition organized by the State Museum of Contemporary Art, for the 1st Biennale of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, Greece.

The title is borrowed from Michel Foucault’s lecture on real spaces-islands where man follows a certain set of rules, which distract him from his daily functions. We interpret Foucault’s text based on new conditions which prove its timelessness. We detect contemporary “heterotopias”, counterpoising real spaces with imaginary ones and we imagine new spaces of the future. As the Biennale’s city, Thessaloniki reevaluates the notions of centre and periphery and brings the periphery to the centre by abolishing the established borders. This way, art is liberated from the restricting walls of a Museum which, regardless, is a “heterotopia” in itself.

The Director of the State Museum of Contemporary Art and one of the three curator of the main programme of the Biennale, Maria Tsantsanoglou -the other two are Catherine David, Jan-Erik Lundström- notes: “Foucault underlines that the museum is a heterotopia. However, in the end, it is the work of art that becomes a heterotopia. It is the creation of a space within the real one, a space that borrows elements from the real space, situations and actions, archives and drawings in order to offer, in the end, a strange reflection of the real space, a “heterotopia”, that exists and is determined by a system of rules referring to ethics and aesthetics codes”.