Hacktivistas.net: Manual de desobediencia a la Ley Sinde (2011) [Spanish]

“Este Manual de desobediencia a la Ley Sinde tiene el objetivo de demostrar la ineficacia radical de la Ley Sinde desde un punto de vista práctico. Los usuarios y webmasters encontrarán los métodos más útiles para sortear las barreras de la censura gubernamental.”

Published in April 2011
Diagonal y Traficantes de Sueños edition
Creative License BY-SA 3.0 España
57 pages

wertdeenlaces.net – Disobeying Sinde-Wert Law (Hacktivistas.net, February 2012) [English]
La primera denuncia de la ley Sinde-Wert en vivo y en directo (Hacktivistas.net, March 2012) [Spanish]
Artist and Hacktivists Sabotage Spanish Anti-Piracy Law (TorrentFreak.com, March 2012) [English]

Authors

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Stefan Szczelkun: Exploding Cinema 1992 – 1999: Culture and Democracy (2002)

The Exploding Cinema is a fusion of projection, performance and social occasion. Architectural spaces, transformed with the use of slides and looped film projections, are used as the backdrop for a programme of short videos, film and performance. A ‘master of ceremonies’ sets up an informal dialogue with the audience, introduces the films and gives filmmakers who are present the chance to speak. She invites the audience to show their films in the future – with the promise that nothing will be censored and everything will be shown. By thoughtful programming this open way of soliciting material results in a varied and lively programme, which continues to attract large audiences.

The Exploding Cinema is democratically run by an open collective. In the last ten years it has put on more that 100 events, showing the work of around 1000 filmmakers, with audience numbers averaging around 200. It is fiercely independent of public grants and supports itself entirely from admission charges.

The group is contextualised against a background of, on the one hand, similarly open cultural formations experienced by the author since 1967 and, on the other, by a history of underground cinema and home movies.

Culture’s central function is taken as being the ongoing total qualitative assessement of any community’s condition. The need for a theoretical framework to develop this basic concept leads to a consideration of Jurgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1981) critiqued using Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. The relation between cultural expression, a community of understanding and democratic consensus is argued as being at the base of an appreciation of such collective activity.

Groups like Exploding Cinema are often complex and multi-layered, with multiple and dynamic authorship. Their discourses can be largely informal, oral and unrecorded. Research methods used should be transparent and their limitations acknowledged.
It is proposed that representations that arise from a triangulation of several methodologies would provide a better basis for historical discourse than any singular approach. Two methodologies are used to analyse existing data (Content Analysis and Semiotics) and two are used to obtain new data (Participant Observation and Oral History). The partial results of each of these are then brought together with traditional archival methods to construct a historical account in which thematic and chronological strands are interwoven.

Phd Thesis
School of Communications, Royal College of Art London, 2002

ExplodingCinema.org online resource

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Mute, 3(2): Politics My Arse (2012)

‘Well, the first thing I want to say is, politics my arse’ Issue 2 includes: cover art by Johnny Spencer * Alberto Toscano on logistics and anarchism * Gail Day on postmodernism at the V&A * Brian Ashton zooms in on RFID * Mark Neocleous on generalised anxiety * Benjamin Noys on spaghetti communism * Howard Slater on the August riots * Mme Tlank and Mira Mattar on motherly love, care and capital * Stefan Szczelkun on Gregory Sholette’s book, Dark Matter * Anustup Basu on the Arab Spring * Sander on why China won’t save capitalism

Editor Josephine Berry Slater
Publisher Mute, February 2012

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