Vahida Ramujkic (ed.): Schengen with Ease (2006) [English, Serbian, Spanish]

‘Extra-comunitarios’, or citizens of non-European countries, have the ‘extra’ bureaucratic task of changing their status, to one that will allow them to move and work ‘freely’ within the European Union. The length and complexity of this process can vary depending on the type of ‘extra-comunitario’ in question. Almost everyone agrees that bureaucracy is the most boring thing on the world. Time spent in waiting rooms and lines is not considered as a part of living, but an interference, daily life put on hold, with the hope that, when it’s all over, it will be possible to take up ‘real’ life again as though nothing had ever happened. It is wasted, meaningless time that has to be erased as soon as the new status is achieved – in the case that process was successful.

“Schengen with ease” is a compilation of material from a variety of official and non-official sources, brought together to explain how daily practices are affected by the application of the EU Foreign Legislation and the Schengen Agreement in the territory of the European Union.

Adopting the Assimil method (Alphonse Chérel, Paris, 1929) this book provides a systematic study of all the bureaucratic steps a “non-EU” citizen might face while trying to obtain EU status. All the required steps are taught through lessons similar to those found in foreign language skill books, comparing the administrative language of European immigration legislation to an unknown language that has to be mastered in order to assimilate in a new environment and receive a determined status.

By organizing the structure of each lesson into Narration, Grammar and Exercise, different approaches to this legal-bureaucratic situation are given.While in Narrative one is exposed laic-experiential relation to the law, law as it is experienced by those who have to fulfill it (that recollects some 30 personal experiences that run through the book and could be followed in independent way), Grammar puts together the legal-normative approximation, law as it is written (information recollected from legal sources from different EU countries and administrative levels). Finally Exercise mix up of different bureaucratic forms that have to be completed, press cuttings, and parts of original documents…

Schengen sin esfuerzo / Schengen with ease
Beograd / Barcelona / Bruxelles, June 2006
ISBN: 0-9550664-8-4
365 pages

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Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu: Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (2006)

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who’s really in control of what’s happening on the Net?

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.

While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.

Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
ISBN 0195152662, 9780195152661
226 pages

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Tanya Leighton (ed.): Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (2008)

“The mutual fascination between art and cinema has had a great influence on contemporary culture. For the past fifty years, the love/hate affair between the two has triggered vital aesthetic, social and political responses that constantly renew the way we understand our age. This book traces the story from early spatial experiments with film and video technologies to the current widespread use of projected images in museums and galleries. Why has there been a turn to the cinematic in contemporary art? What happens to the moving image when it shifts from the black box to the white cube, when cinema is exhibited? How does this challenge the traditional mediums of film, painting and sculpture? Art and the Moving Image gathers together key texts including new, translated and previously unpublished essays by eminent writers and theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Beatriz Colomina, Serge Daney, Rosalind Krauss, Maurizio Lazzaratto, and Peter Wollen. It offers an essential introduction to the complex field of art and the projected image for both students and general readers.”

Publisher Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, London, 2008
ISBN 185437625X, 9781854376251
496 pages

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