1. maggio/maig/mayo/may/mai 2004
Milano- Barcelona
Euro Mayday 004

Flexworkers of europe let's unite!
There's a World of Rights to Fight for:
Steady Income & Paid Vacation,
Access to Housing, Loving, Hacking

MAYDAY, MAYDAY!! Why precari@s, intermittents, cognitari/e are rebelling across EUROPA...

Remember MAYDAY, the global holiday of workers, dear to anarchists and socialists worldwide, born in America and mummified in Russia and China, fallen in neglect in Europe as neoliberalism mounted and many unions sold out? Well, in Milano since 2001 a network of Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish media hacktivists, rank-and-file unions, self-run and squatted youth centers, critical mass bikers, radical networks, student groups, syndicalist collectives, immigrants' associations, assorted commies, greens, anarcos, gays and feminists have given life to a MAYDAY PARADE taking place in the afternoon of May 1st, whose participation and meaning has grown tremendously from 5,000 to 50,000 people, thereby triggering many urban actions and social conflicts that are spreading among young temps, partimers, freelance and contract workers, researchers and teachers, service and culture workers in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere across Europe.

MAYDAY has been not only an event, but also a method, a project, and a process. A horizontal METHOD of crossnetworking the Genoa movement with the radical sections of unionism, based on subvertising, picketing, organizing and equal access to many identities and ways of action, thereby enabling the alliance between two generations of conflict. A PROCESS of radicalizing transeuropean service and knowledge workers to constitute an insurgent identity capable of contributing to a new european political and social SPACE in place of the one which recently foundered in Brussels.

PRECARIOUSNESS is what we live, FLEXICURITY is what we want. Across Euroland. And fast. We demand security and universality of income, social and vacation benefits, increased overtime and limitations on night and sunday work, subsidized education, housing, health, free access to media and knowledege, a eurowide minimum wage, right to union-organizing for temps and flextimers, an end of wage and union discrimination by employers between temp and non-temp labor, such as the fact that a partimer's hour is paid less than a fulltimer's, an end to xenophobic laws and mass deportations that are suppressing the free circulation of people of all hues, religions, and cultures across NEUROPA.

After Atocha, it's clear to everybody we are living in a WAR SOCIETY where all of us who live and love, think and struggle, get high or low, have become bomb-fodder for fundamentalist and neoliberal franchises alike. We live constantly under risk, under an imminent threat of destruction. It is not only basic social services, our incomes and jobs that are under fierce attack everywhere, but our very bodies could be annihilated in an instant at any instant, in a train, a building, a subway, a mall. Aznar's cynical attempt to manipulate the sorrow of Spaniards, Catalans, Basques and Europeans, has backfired and undermined one of the three neoliberal pillars on which euro bushism rests.

Now Blair and Berlusconi must absolutely follow the destiny of their military ally, this is what flex, temp and knowledge workers all over Europe demand, as March 20 unambiguously demonstrated in the giant street rallies that peacefully seized all euro metropolises, and especially Roma and Barcelona. March 20 can be the reversal of the apocalyptic trends unleashed all over the world by September 11 and the global war that has followed. March 20 shows that radical democracy can defeat neoliberalism and really make the world a safer place for all human beings.

We are also living in a WAR ECONOMY set in motion by an ongoing act of imperial aggression to establish the world hegemony of a neoliberal model that has proved incapable of either spreading wealth or preventing crisis. In the name of neoliberalism, the political élites of the West, reinforced by coercive social norms, such as drug prohibitionism or the return to family values, constant remote monitoring and close surveillance of unrest and disarray, have sold souls and assets to transnational financial markets and corporations, by privatizing utilities, housing, health, schooling, the ether, thus reinforcing the neoliberal bias in favor of stronger inequality.

Rumsfeld's flexible war had WAL-MART as logistics model, thanks to its information-rich labor-intensive efficient flow of goods and services. Wal-Mart is the biggest corporation and largest supermarket chain on earth. It's also a firm that pays on average SUBPOVERTY WAGES and imports huge quantities of textiles and other goods from Chinese non-union factories and weatshops. Global chainstore brands like Wal-Mart, Ikea, Carrefour, Adecco, Auchan/Alcampo, Manpower, Metro, Yum! Brands, Esselunga, Autogrill are the essence of how neoliberal corporations look at people: pliant, obedient, subservient, manipulable, available on call and on demand, exploitable at will, firable at whim.

We are convinced that at the core of the process of neoliberal accumulation lies flexible and contingent labor by the young, women, migrants and casualized employees, in crucial reproductive and distribution services, and in the knowledge, culture, and media industries that provide the raw material on which the system functions: information. We call ourselves PRECOG because we embody the PRECARIAT working in retail and services and the COGNITARIAT of media and education industries. We are the producers of neoliberal wealth, we are the creators of knowledge, style and culture enclosured and appropriated by monopoly power.

We believe the celebration of EURO MAYDAY on May 1 --in 2004 date of EU entry for ten states from Eastern, Central, Mediterranean Europe but not for their migrants, and since 1886 the world's festivity of defiant workers-- could COMMUNICATE, INTERWEAVE, HIGHLIGHT to the world the many RADICAL IDENTITIES of precarized, outsourced, offshored, downsized, downgraded, impoverished, humiliated and plain stressed-out temp/flex workers across 21st Century Europe, aka NEUROPA.

We have chosen the MAYDAY PARADE, to be propagated and subvertised via independent omnimedia (print, spray, radio, video, net, satellite etc), as a libertarian and multi-identity format featuring dozens of sound trucks, carnival and allegorical wagons, vans, carts, and bicycles with kids and grown-ups, jugglers of jobs and contorsionists of flexibility, all together expressing cheerful anger against the exclusion of a whole generation and soon the rest of society from social rights with guarantees of collective self-defense. These must have either a continental and federal eurowide coverage or they won't come into being. To put it simply, in the Euro MayDay Parades in MILANO, BARCELONA and elsewhere, we wanna rock the euro boat to get our rightful share of the booty...

EURO MAYDAY PARADE 004
eco/media activism joins metro/labor radicalism
for a bush-free europe

>from *Euro Mayday site*.

related context
> free culture manifesto. the mission of the free culture movement is to reclaim our culture from corporate control. our goal is to defend free and open cultural space and protect public intellectual capital from privatization and exploitation.
> verso un manifesto del lavoro cognitivo.

imago
> we: the flexworkers

Luna Nera is a London-based group concerned with creating site-responsive mixed media work. Our projects feed public curiosity about forgotten spaces, and at the same time expose art in ways that are completely different to the accepted demarcation for art-consumption.

Luna Nera has been working as an artist-curator group since 1997 in London. During this time we have created a number of large-scale live and visual art events in disused premises.

Luna Nera aims to stimulate interest in the environmental and architectural heritage of localities. By asking the audience to re-look at sites in a new way, Luna Nera addresses a series of issues around ideas of society, community, history, memory and public space. Our mission is to reclaim disused or abandoned "forgotten" spaces through art. The work is created and presented in direct response to the environment, transcribing histories, memories, textures and functions into art.

Luna Nera is concerned with exploring the conjunction of theory and practice in site-specific/site-responsive work, through a series of projects that also include text, talks and workshops.

The first show emerged from a spontaneous explosion of energy and a necessity for an alternative space where each can evolve towards the same goal (an event), and have the freedom to experiment, explore, transform and diverge as far as they desire. Each artist was chosen for their similar attitude towards the delivery of artistic concerns, their ability to deliver quality work and their understanding of the space they were to evolve in. It became very obvious to the members of our group that there was a real shortage of opportunities for the practitioners and public alike to experience 'misplaced buildings.'

Our brief is to work within spaces, which have a specific former use, and to present installation and performance works that evoke a response to the environment.

Typically we choose high-profile vacant spaces of cultural or infra-structural significance (a former theatre, riding school, bank, factories, synagogue, prison, electricity generating station) in order to highlight how the social focus has shifted in current times.

In our work we create a means for live art to happen. The performers/ artists are invited by us not simply to perform but to participate in the creation of a total experience. The live art is the final stage in the creative process for the group; it represents a kind of consecration of the creative environment. >from *Luna Nera site*.

related context
> kronstadt 2004. interconnection. 'interconnection' will seek to blur the boundaries of dichotomies such as art/life, past/present, nature/civilisation, public/private. june 25-27, 2004
> civic tv: alternative visions of the urban experience. november 21, 2003
> psy-geo-conflux: the meaning of living in a city. may 14, 2003

imago
> leap on public curiosity

On April 23, students at Swarthmore College launch a new international student organization dedicated to fighting coercive copyright practices and other threats to the free flow of information. The event will feature a keynote speech from Lawrence Lessig and the founding meeting of the new student organization. The new group will leverage the power of students at colleges and universities around to the world and promises to be a leading voice for copyright reform, online rights, and free and open-source software.

This new organization follows the success that Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons has had with their lawsuit to stop Diebold Election System’s abuse of copyright law. A partner in this new organization is music activist group Downhill Battle (downhillbattle.org), best known for their historic Grey Tuesday protest in which 170 websites defied cease and desist letters from EMI Records in a day of coordinated civil disobedience to fight music censorship and support sampling rights for artists.

The featured speaker at the event is author and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who represented book publisher Eric Eldred in the groundbreaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig has been named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.” The founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, he is the author of Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain as well as a member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community at the University of Pennsylvania.

Students from a many different colleges and universities are expected to attend the lecture and planing meeting that will follow. April 23 will also see the official launch of FreeCulture.org, a site which will serve as an informational base and organizing tool for new organization. The group is dedicated to what it calls a “bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture,” which it says is under assault by the recent expansion of intellectual property law. >from *Swarthmore College Students to Launch International Movement for Free Culture*. April 20, 2004

FreeCulture.org is the home of an international student movement for free culture. Although many activist organizations have arisen to protect and promote free culture (including the EFF, FSF, and Creative Commons), for true change in the system, we must look to the future -- the youth of the world. If we can win the hearts and minds of the next generation, the vested interests will slowly and inexorably become irrelevant. And who is more qualified to build a student movement than the students themselves? Everyone is welcome, young or old, but our focus is organizing on high school and college campuses. Together, we have the potential to become a revolutionary force for creativity and innovation. >from *FreeCulture.org site*.

related context
> free culture.how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity by lawrence lessig
> free culture manifesto. the mission of the free culture movement is to reclaim our culture from corporate control. our goal is to defend free and open cultural space and protect public intellectual capital from privatization and exploitation.
> copyleft bcn'04. april 16, 2004
> free as in freedom: the life story of richard stallman. june 25, 2002
> creative commons: law and technology. may 24, 2002

imago
> stock up and hit the streets

In the last two decades the developed world has initiated a broad transformation... a miraculous change in paradigms

Spain, until now, has scarcely contributed to any of the big concepts and technologies which are constructing the future. Even thought the accumulated knowledge in all these areas and their implications are leading the way to follow in economics, politics, social... The path chosen by Spain in these last 25 years is somehow a paradox. In this time the Spanish economy has succeed in occupying a prominent international position. And it has been achieved without investing generating knowledge but providing services, particularly tourism and leisure; keeping a production policy economically competitive and, we should not forget, spending the European Cohesion Founds and Regional Development... In these days, however, the model in which the Spanish economy is based starts to show symptoms of exhaustion. The industrial replacement, the emerging economies, or the increasing Spanish dependence in external technology and science, are more then real threats. Such situation provides no time for delay...

As signers of this document, active biomedicine scientist, believe to represent a large part of the scientific community. Aware of the serious deficit to overcome and the benefits that the investment in Science will bring to the Spanish society, we propose a large National Agreement for the Sciences were in addition to the government and the political parties, the regional governments, economic and social representatives, the scientific themselves. >del *Pacto de Estado por la Ciencia*. February 24, 2004

The number of objecting scientist, in disagreement with the military spend in the Spanish scientific research (R&D), has already passed 2000 individuals. In detail, there are already 2050 researchers that has manifest their commitment to not participate in any research concerning weapons nor the army. The scientist demand to the Spanish Government 'a progressive transfer of the R&D defense budged towards social and civil objectives'...

This information was publicly released in the Campaign 'For Peace: Not to the Military Research' promoted by the Fundacio Per la Pau, the Spanish Federation of Engineers without Frontiers and more than 40 NGOs, students associations, worker unions and social groups from all around the country, demanding to the government a change in orientation towards civil R&D.

According to the OCDE, Spain is the second developed country that invest more in military R&D, just after USA. For the 2004, the government spends a 32% of the public R&D budget for military programs. This is three times more than the main funding program for Universities and Public Research Centers. Since 1995 the military R&D has increased a 475% >de *El número de objetores científicos a la investigación militar llega a los 2000*. February 18, 2004

WE REQUIRE that the future of science in Spain to the an state matter (supra-governmental issue), with the needed parliamentary consensus to organize and carry out a scientific planning a middle and long term, without ambiguities derived form political shifts. As a result, the research budget has to be increased and to reach, as means of the GNP percentage, the European average in short, with a clear and concise pluriannual funding protocol; the up dating and adaptation of the administrative process to a highly competitive and changing environment; the increase of the independence of the R&D administration; the re-definition of the public administrative organisms, the increase of the Scientific contents in public education, the design of long term strategies, that let to an increase of the number of scientists per inhabitant, and the design of political activities that award and dignify the scientific endeavor. >del *Manifiesto por la ciencia*. April, 2003

related context
> oecd science, technology and industry scoreboard 2003. towards a knowledge-based economy.
> science misuse. february 24, 2004
> berlin declaration: science and culture accessible to all internet users. november 5, 2003
> science commons: building a free flow of knowledge. march 15, 2002

imago
> ibero-science: what's going on?

There is life beyond restrictive copyright. And it in spite of the threats, the persecutions and the apocalyptic declarations of those who - like the SGAE, the BSA or the RIAA- live shopping and exploding all expression of the human thought and turning scarce infinite goods. In spite of these corsairs of the other people's creation, who foment the shortage in an artificial way, the era of the abundance has arrived at least at the scope of the intellectual production and is real possibilities to stimulate the creation, to break the 'digital divide', to share the knowledge, the culture and the art, to live on the own creations, to reframe the industry, and all it with no need to clip basic rights of the citizenship neither to harden the penal code, nor to criminalize the mutual cooperation or to penalize the free circulation of the knowledge.

The beneficiaries of the restriction of the copy right try to deny it, to hide it, to criminalize it, but exists a scope to which we will denominate 'commons' - recovering an old word that talks about those fields whose advantage is made of communal form -, that has always existed in form of expressions of popular culture and that today reaches all its apogee with the digital culture. We wished to put in the center of the public debate the fact that we are every time more immersed in a global economy whose material base is goods that do not assume any material form. With this the rules of the game that have characterized the distribution of the cultural and artistic goods in last two centuries, based in the laws of copyright and of patents, are being modified. To think that the same legal system devised for the physical world can prevail for fundamentally different surroundings like the cyberspace is a stupidity of epochal proportions that already we are paying all, in form of unjust laws, abusive enterprise practices and the criminalization of the immense majority of the population, considered as a potential 'pirate'. With restrictive policies and to benefit of the possessors of corsair patent, the creation is not fomented, but the coexistence is poisoned, the sources of the innovation are dried and the innovation becomes difficult. But the bank accounts of the lawyers and corporations are fattened. >from *¿Proteger o expoliar? Procomún frente a propiedad intelectual. Introduction text to 'Copyleft. Jornadas críticas sobre propiedad intelectual'. Barcelona, april 15-18, 2004.

related context
> copyleft: meeting on intellectual property. march 26, 2003
> a new cultural movement?. august 7, 2002
> science commons. building a free flow of knowledge. march 15, 2002
> open source company research project. 2002-2003
> lexigrafik#001 *copyleft+[genoma]. september, 2000

imago
> BCN copyleft

10 days of web strike Vs 20 years of patent nightmare
We are protesting against software patents in Europe.

Most software will become illegal to use in Europe if this dangerous directive is adopted without proper amending.

The Commission and the Council of Ministers are covertly pushing for unlimited patentability of software, heavily lobbied by multinationals and patent lawyers. They are ignoring the democratically voted decision of the European Parliament from 24 september 2003, which has the support of more than 300.000 citizens, 2.000.000 SMEs, dozens of economists and scientists.

Join us in a demonstration in the streets of Brussels on 14 april 2004.

Join this online protest by changing your homepage from 5 until 15 april. >from *Demo.ffii.org*. Demo.ffii.org contains practical information about the online demonstration and the 14/04/2004 Brussels demonstration against software patents.

In ancient maps of the world, expanses of unknown territory might hold a warning to would-be explorers: Here there be monsters. For today's explorers seeking to navigate and understand the world of science, the monsters are the untamed collections of data that inhabit a largely uncharted landscape.

The April 6, 2004, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) features nearly 20 articles by some of tomorrow's mapmakers. Representing the computer, information and cognitive sciences, mathematics, geography, psychology and other fields, these researchers present attempts to create maps of science from the ever-growing and constantly evolving ocean of digital data.

"Science is specializing at high speed, which leads to increasing fragmentation and reinvention," said Katy Börner of Indiana University. "Maps of publication databases or other data sources can help show how scientists and scientific results are interconnected. Creating a map for all of science will require large-scale cyberinfrastructure," Börner said. "The endeavor will involve terabytes of data -- publications, patents, grants and other databases -- scalable software and large amounts of number-crunching power. Such computational effort is common in physics or biology but not in the social sciences. However, maps of science will benefit every field."

Several of the papers describe ways to analyze article collections and map out landscapes that humans can view. Some methods 'read' scientific articles and use a deep understanding of the content as the basis for a map. Other methods use relationship networks between the articles, such as citation of other papers, as the basis for a map. 'Process' models aim to better understand how the structure of scientific networks evolves over time. One researcher demonstrates that some combination of content and Web links or citation relationships needs to be considered, while others consider topics, newness, and linking to show how several such networks might evolve together.

Scientific landscapes might have hundreds of possible dimensions, presenting a challenge in creating two- or three-dimensional maps. Mapping methods must also identify the data-collection analogs of landmarks and borders. clusters in social networks can also be used to map scientific communities. A scientist may or may not be six degrees from Kevin Bacon, but scientists were about six coauthors away from any other scientist. However, these borders, like the world's political boundaries, change over time. Finally, in a digital landscape with hundreds of possible options for north or south, east or west, drawing a map with which human explorers can navigate from point A to point B presents another set of challenges. Researchers describe techniques to draw maps that highlight landmarks such as major research topics or trends, and show too how techniques from geographic mapmaking might be applied to science landscapes. >from *Here There Be Data: Mapping the Landscape of Science*. April 6, 2004

related context
> mapping knowledge domains. pnas online. april 6, 2004
> berlin declaration: science and culture accessible to all internet users. november 5, 2003
> science commons: building a free flow of knowledge. march 15, 2002

imago
> science landscape formations
[from wafer defects]

New finds from an open-air archaeological site in the Loiyangalani River Valley (Serengeti National Park. Tanzania) have intriguing implications for the evolution of modern human behavior, including further indications that symbolic thinking developed in humans earlier than the currently accepted date of about 35,000 years ago.

Archaeologists studying the site say it may contain some of the strongest evidence yet for the early development of modern cultural behavior in humans, and is the first such discovery of its kind in East Africa, indicating that cultural modernity may have been widespread across Africa during the Middle Stone Age.

The researchers report that preliminary excavation has yielded ochre pencils, bone artifacts, fish bones, mammal bones and two ostrich egg shell beads in association with an assembly of Middle Stone Age tools. There are other ostrich eggshell fragments that may represent debris from bead manufacture. The Middle Stone Age in East Africa originates as early as 280,000 years ago, and is replaced by the Later Stone Age at about 45,000 years ago, though none of the Loiyangalani finds have been precisely dated as of yet using advanced dating techniques.

Until relatively recently, it was generally believed that human 'behavioral modernity' -- the ability to think abstractly and to create culture and art -- developed in humans significantly after Homo sapiens evolved to its present physical form (circa 120,000 years before present) and first in Eurasia, where human art and sophisticated artifacts begin appearing about 35,000 years ago. Recent evidence, including important discoveries of sophisticated bone tools from Blombos Cave in South Africa dated at more than 70,000 years old, have weakened this argument, showing that human tool technologies were significantly advanced before humans left Africa. The decorations on two ochre pieces from Blombos Cave have been interpreted as signs of symbolic activity, but that interpretation is debated.

The researchers see the beads as significant indicators of human cultural modernity because beads are clearly decorative, and decoration strongly implies abstract and symbolic thinking. Ostrich egg shell beads may also be indicators of even broader cultural developments. While there is no evidence of how the beads were used, ethnographic studies of recent African hunter-gatherer societies show that modern beads of this type are often used in trade between groups. The methods that are used to produce ostrich shell beads are also significantly more sophisticated than any techniques used to produce the tools generally found in the Middle Stone Age. The beads, which are still produced by African Khoi-San (Bushman) cultures today, are typically produced by breaking the shell into small pieces, which are then drilled and strung on a fiber or sinew. The strung shell fragments' edges are then smoothed and rounded as a group to produce uniform beads. >from *East African Artifacts Support Evolution of Symbolic Thinking in Middle Stone Age*. March 31, 2004

related context
> the serengeti genesis project. unearthing human origins.
> human origins: gene mutation linked to evolution. march 26, 2004
> ishango, the bone that began the space odyssey: were african women our first mathematicians?. march 8, 2002
> abstract engravings from stone age: cognitive modernity first evolved in africa. january 18, 2002
> technology and evolution: paleolithic technology and human evolution . march 13, 2001

imago
> african incubation of symbolic thought

Celebrating the arrival of the spring, this openfriday approaches the creative process in video and dance.

Dionís Escorsa presents a compilation of video that analyze the paradox of the reintegration of the images in the same reality from where they have been removed. Its projection as space installation often is like almost phantasmagoric echo of the own place that serves to show to them. These represented appearances, are they objects or personages, who can arise behind a door or remove the head by a window, are used to to being filmed in the same place, using treatments of videografic animation and following the same directives of perspective and scale which later they serve like support of the result, conferring to the expositive space a category almost of performer, of space act. They are gags short, situations to say more theater than cinematographic, - often repeating itself in form of loop to look for plus a quality of presence that of narration, - in which these appearances make autoreferencial acts almost always. The time like condition for the movement, the death like cycle aim, the constant change or growth like life definition, desire like first motor, they are some of the ample thematic references of these escenografic representations.

First, Penélope Serrano and finally, Inact-Efact (Kristal Montana and Janina Riera), share with us their dance, doing use of sensors displayed in the openfriday of January (pd open dev). Penélope with a dance 'solo': 'Vidrá'. Next they act Inact-Efact doing an exploration of the Rites of the Spring of Igor Stravinsky, also gathering elements of a previous videoperformance, in which they treated about the found dual qualities in our psychic world from a reflective study on the emotional balance. Inact-Efact looks for the touching immersion of the public, and in this occasion it does in an experimentation opened to the improvisation, in a dialogue with the companions who have developed the sensors and the programming, visual and sonic landscapes...

Alex Posada (nice-noise)has prepared the sensors and with Xavi Manzanares aka Moe (onnirik.org), has programmed its use by means of PureData; in addition they have contributed to the sonorous landscapes for the dance. Sara (r3) and Eduardo Imasaka do the visuals 'mix' for the performance of Janina and Kristal. The 'bricoleur' Jean-Pierre Girault aka Geppeto has everywhere been where to fact it lacks.

openfriday@straddle3
·······························
video + dance
friday april 2, 2004. 20 h
straddle3. c/ riereta, 32 1-3
barcelona

related context
> openfridays
> pd open dev: puredata open development/devices. january 24, 2004
> pd open dev en onnirik. descripción del equipo y reflexión. "pd open dev entrecruza los ambitos de la tecnologia /la domotica /la gestualidad /el cuerpo/ el movimiento físico/ el open source/ la autogestión/ la autoconstrucción para la búsqueda de nuevo territorios".

imago
> the dance rites quadrille