SYMPOSIUM "INVISIBLE THREAT"
18. 6.-21. 6., 13.00-18.00, Kapelica Gallery, Kersnikova 4

18. 6., 13.00-18.00
Darij Zadnikar (Slovenia)
A professor of philosophy at the School of Pedagogy in Ljubljana, the editor of the Journal for the critique of science, for imagination and new anthropology, a journalist, and an activist in new global political movements. He prepared a special "welcome" for Bush and Putin in Ljubljana (2001), was the target of provocations by the repressive apparatus of Slovenia, participated in the demonstrations in Genoa (2001), took part in discussions at the European Social Forum in Florence (2002), and studied with the insurgent indigenous peoples of southern Mexico.

Lecture: Invisible to Power
The waning of the nation-state does not yet mean the demise of its political elites. For them, this is a liberation from their accountability to "the people", a concept they were obliged to reconstruct in their ideological equations. On the lower levels, there are the remaining heterogeneous structures, which are targeted by periodic political marketing, while on the upper levels, there hover the liberated political, academic, economic, and cultural elites, as well as other elites. But the multitudes below have started to breathe again and are beginning to build their own worlds - a world of many different worlds, which the monolithic logic of neoliberalism cannot accommodate; a world of life experiments, each of which is guided by stubborn noncompliance. Mutually contaminating and interfering with each other, these various types of noncompliance evolve into a threat. The elusiveness and invisibility of the social rhizome consist in its network nature, its chaotic movement "on the ground", the way it can switch realities and exchange aggregate social states. What threatens the elites is a political movement that wants to change the world without assuming power. The elites would like to behead its leaders, but there are no leaders. They try to find some organization, but the most that exists is provisional coordination. They are aware of the threat of the multitudes but it is invisible to them.

Borut Brumen (Slovenia)
A lecturer in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the School of the Arts, University of Ljubljana. In his fieldwork in Mediterranean countries and West Africa, he deals with such issues as social memories and identities, borders and ethnic studies, conflicts and violence. As a visiting professor, he has taught at the University of Vienna and the Free University in Berlin. He is an activist involved with new global political movements and took part in the occupation of Metelkova, the intergalactic congress in Berlin (1996), the founding of the Office for Interventions, and actions against xenophobia and intolerance, NATO, the war in Iraq, and world militarization, as well as a number of art projects (Urbanaria, Contributions Toward Defining the Typology and Topology of the Slovene Mediterranean Artist, the pyrotechnic spectacle PUR, and The Plastos Civilization).

Lecture: The Last Battle for Africa
The author analyzes the consequences of the wars for the "new world order" in Africa, especially those waged by the United States and France in the last decade. He compares French and American policy toward Africa in the last decade, and especially their role in instigating conflicts and wars in certain African countries (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and Angola). He points out that these cases represent a new form of a world war; quite a few wars have been fought on African soil solely because of the United States' desire to dislodge France from Africa and so assume control over the continent's strategic resources. These conflicts, which have already claimed several million victims, have also been supported by interested global multinational corporations. In the end, they divide up the blood profits among themselves and establish a system of threats that ensures the preservation of the new world order in Africa.

René Passet (France)
René Passet is a distinguished professor of economics at the University of Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne and the former president of the Scientific Council of the ATTAC movement. He is the author of many scholarly works, including L'économique et vivant [The economical and the living; Economica, 1996 (2nd ed.)], for which he received an award from the Académie française des Sciences morales et politiques; L'illusion néo-libérale [The neoliberal illusion; Fayard, 2000]; Eloge du mondialisme par un anti présumé [A eulogy to globalism by a presumed antiglobalist; Fayard 2001]; and Une économie de ręve, la plančte folie [An economy of dreaming, the mad planet; Mille-et-une-nuits, Fayard, 2003].
Links:
http://www.denistouret.net/textes/Passet.html
http://www.planetecologie.org/ENCYCLOPEDIE/Pionniers/RenePasset.htm
http://mapage.noos.fr/RVD/passet.htm

Lecture: Consequences of neoliberalism
René Passet will discuss the origins, manifestation, scope, and consequences of neoliberalism, an ideological movement that began in the 1980s and took economic liberalism to its extreme limits, stressing the benefits of the free flow of capital around the world and complete entrepreneurial freedom. The result: today international finance has only indirect contact with the financing of commercial exchange in the global economy; the stock market is the center of economic life; speculation has become one of the main roads to wealth. Financial efficiency, as the highest goal, has exacted a sacrifice from people in the form of shifting wages and employment, a reduction of social security, the blocking of the implementation of the Doha agreement, which makes it possible for poor countries to produce at low cost generic drugs against HIV/AIDS, and so on. Stock-market capitalism has triggered a host of contemporary economic, political, and social crises. A world ruled by the logic of its means is insane. Wherever the rule of money is in effect, things go awry. Politics has the responsibility to once again make economics and finance merely the means to achieving a goal and to establish humanity as that goal. Citizens have the obligation to influence their governments democratically (wherever democracy exists) so that they move in this direction.

19. 6., 13.00-18.00
Beatriz da Costa (USA)
Beatriz da Costa is a machine artist and tactical media practitioner. Her background is in kinetic sculpture, interactive installation and recently robotic art. Her current interests include the use of robotic behavior within various fields of cultural production. She has also been working in collaboration with Critical Art Ensemble since 2000. Her recent shows include ISEA 2002 in Japan and the World Information Organization in Amsterdam. She is a visiting assistant professor in the departments of art and media study at State University of New York at Buffalo. Currently, she is also part of the International Editorial Team for the Next 5 Minutes 4 festival, to be held in Amsterdam in June 2003.
Links: http://www.beatrizdacosta.net

Brooke Singer (USA)
Brooke Singer lives and works in New York City. She is a new media artist and an assistant curator of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Her current projects reflect her various interests in image-making, espionage and the Internet. She is interested in the effects of digital networks on experience in the physical, lived-in world. Some of Brooke's recent activities include writing for Rhizome's Net Art News and co-curating the Sculpture Now exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Links: http://www.bsing.net

Lecture: Swipe
Swipe, an on-going project in collaboration with Jamie Schulte, is a multi-disciplinary performance. It addresses the gathering of data from drivers' licenses, a form of data-collection that more and more businesses are starting to practice in the United States. Bars and convenience stores were the first businesses in the United States to utilize license scanners for the purpose of age and I.D. verification. These businesses, however, admit that they reap huge benefits from this practice that go beyond catching underage drinkers and smokers and people with fake IDs. With a single swipe - which often occurs without the notification or consent of the cardholder - a business acquires data free of charge that it can use to build a valuable consumer database. Post 9/11, such businesses as hospitals and airports have been installing driver's license readers in the name of security. Swipe draws attention to this practice and makes it possible for U.S. citizens to see exactly what is stored on their mysterious strip. Swipe also illustrates how this information is used and why businesses crave it. The idea is to encourage the development of databases as a discursive, organizational practice and an essential technique of power in today's social field.

Joey Skaggs, Larry Croft Phd. (USA, Switzerland)
Joey Skaggs is the one of the world's most notorious hoaxers. His work is unorthodox, provocative and iconoclastic. Using both guerrilla tactics and advertising and public relations techniques to make social commentary, Skaggs holds a mirror up to society. He illustrates how the hype, hypocrisy, propaganda and disinformation that are fed to the media are then fed by the media to the public. His work also shows how vulnerable the public is to the abuses of an irresponsible news media. He and his performances have appeared on - CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Good Morning America, Phil Donahue,
National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Life,WIRED, New York, People, and The New York Times...

link: http://www.joeyskaggs.com

Larry Croft studied physics at the University of Queensland, Australia. His interest in chaos and systems theory led him into biology, which then led him to do a PHD in computational genomics. Construction of an intron database, ISIS, in 2000 led to an oft cited Nature Genetics publication describing the high prevalence of alternate splicing in the human genome. He has also published diversely in journals such as Microbiology, QUT Law & Justice and Microbial and Comparative Genomics. His current research field is bacterial and eukaryote genetic regulatory systems.

Lecture: "Imagination: The Ultimate Threat"
Showing examples of his work, Joey Skaggs will discuss the hoax as an art form and the role of the artist as activist to effectively change consciousness. The distinction between reality and imagination has become blurred and the masses are manipulated through the orchestration of their emotions. Advertisers, governments, and religious groups are masters at psy-ops. We are inundated with disinformation and propaganda designed to make us consumers or to make us believers or to make us into sacrificial lambs, willing to die for our country. Ideas need only to be imagined to be useful. One has only to imply a threat or a promise to be effective at controlling or changing behavior.

With Larry Croft, PHD in the fields of pathogen microbiology and human genetics, Skaggs will present the Stop BioPEEP hoax. BioPEEP, the code name for a top secret research project commissioned by an unnamed multinational corporation, was a sinister plot to genetically alter and irreversibly addict human beings who unknowingly consumed their products. The addiction was caused by a genetically engineered "product" virus, which permanently altered the DNA structure of the host. This addiction-causing material would create human "consumer product junkies", thus assuring this multinational corporation total market dominance. For example, if the company was a cola company, the consumer would become addicted to that specific brand of cola and none other. The U.S. Government co-opted the research when it realized its potential as a
new weapon with which it could target genetic racial types and eradicate them
at will, allowing for undetectable pre-emptive strikes (geneocide).
www.stopbiopeep.com

James L. Acord (USA)
James Acord is a lifelong career sculptor best known for blending his ideas and imagery with the medium in which he works. Seeking durability and permanence in outdoor urban environments, he moved to America's granite center in Vermont in the 1970s. Granite is the most radioactive of traditional sculpture materials, and its durability recommends it for the warning markers needed for the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Located in Acord's home state of Washington, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is second only to Chernobyl in being contaminated in perpetuity. Moving to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in 1989, he took classes in nuclear science and engineering, seeking to know the fabrication processes of the materials utilized in the nuclear industry: 316 stainless steel, titanium, zirconium, etc. In the course of these studies, he learned that the advent of the nuclear age gave humankind the power of transmutation, an age-old dream. To transmute one elemental substance into another is, fundamentally, a sculptural process. Access to nuclear reactors for artistic purposes has proven very difficult. James Acord was artist-in-residence in the physics department at Imperial College in 1998 and 1999. Today, he works without official sanction in the state of Washington.
Links:
Hanover Monument: http://www.tcfn.org/timecapsule/html/james_l._acord.html
Hanford Project: http://www.kimstringfellow.com/hanford/hanintro.html

Lecture: Atomic age - age of promises and peril
The age-old dream of transmuting elemental matter was only accomplished in the past century. For much of the time, the knowledge and effects of such endeavors were intentionally kept hidden from society. Humanity's entrance into the atomic age was filled with both promises and peril. Governments have kept the peril invisible from both their citizens and their neighbors. They have denied the existence of any threats less visible than nuclear weapons and poorly designed power reactors. The economic, environmental and societal damage done to a nation and the world is immeasurable and perhaps irreparable. The uranium miners, nuclear workers, and the people living near processing plants and weapons tests were kept in the dark about the known dangers. These dangers remained invisible. James L. Acord believes art can bring understanding to the unknown, and bring things into the general consciousness. In his view, art illuminates the hidden so a broader cross-section of humanity can participate in the debate.

20. 6., 13.00-18.00
Mike Hentz (Switzerland, USA)
Mike Hentz, a communications artist who works in various media, was already involved in cultural networking at a time when Internet was not yet a common praxis. As a member of minus delta T, he collaborated on The Bangkok Project - the transportation of a Celtic stone through Europe and Asia. Subsequently, he used new audiovisual media to realize the concept of cultural transport (the Van Gogh TV/Ponton European Media Art Lab and Piazza Virtuale, presented in 1992 at Kassel Documenta, did pioneering work in interactive television). For Hentz, however, worldwide exchange via the Internet is not enough. To do justice to the physical side of art, he regularly organizes such gatherings as the Odysseys or the Medusa Festival (Poland) in order to bring together international artists, theoreticians ...

Lecture: Paranoia in Virtual Media and the Roots of Fear in Electricity
In his lecture-performance, Mike Hentz will deal with the paranoia and fear spread through virtual media. He will refer to the theories of René Girard - Le violence et le sacre [The Violence and the Holy], Guenther Anders - Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Antiquity of the Human Being] and Marshall Berman - All That is Solid Melts into Air. Thesis: Ever since electricity and, later, virtuality was introduced in society, humanity has been approaching a godlike state of being. At the same time we face today a decadent "twilight of the gods" (the collapse of ethical and moral values) and, since we are part of it, we often do not know whether we are now really godlike or merely cheap human beings. This split identity does not protect us from our traditional fear of the unknown (in metaphorical terms, the gods and the supernatural). Throughout history, the practice of SACRIFICE had, generally speaking, two functions: first, sacrifices were made as a way of conciliating the unknown with a gift in order to be safe and protected from "It," and second, one performed a sacrifice in order to stop the spiral of violence created by revenge killings. These rituals may seem outdated today, but strangely enough, the virtual world (TV, cinema, print media, and videogames) is filled with bloody revenge killings and, to the horror and fear of many of us, these "outdated rituals" ARE BECOMING MORE AND MORE THE REALITY in national and international wars and conflicts.

Mladen Dolar (Slovenia)
Mladen Dolar held a position of professor in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, for twenty years till 2002, now he works as a researcher and an editor. Publications in Slovene include The Structure of Fascist Domination (1982), Hegel and the Object (with Slavoj Žižek, 1985), Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (2 vols, 1990, 1992), On Avarice (2002) etc. In English: Opera's Second Death (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2002), His Master's Voice (to be published by Verso in 2004). Numerous contributions to scientific journals and collections; numerous lectures in USA, UK, Germany etc.

Lecture: The power of the invisible
The invisible threat is a good description of the structure of power as such, for no power functions solely on the basis of what is visible, tangible and intelligible. The threat is a potentiality which produces effects while remaining a potentiality, the effects of power emerge without the threat being deployed. The 'master-signifier' is precisely the signifier of an invisible threat, its invisible half is its essential feature. The paper dwells for a moment on Aristotle's hint of a link between potentiality and power, the basis for understanding the political, and describes some conventional ways of holding the threat in check. The problem of modern power, however, the power emerging in the new world order and particularly of the new scene of power after 11 September, is rather the opposite: how to maintain the prevalence of the invisible threat and to make it operative in defusing the democratic structures, all this under the banner of the defence of democracy against the invisible threat of terror. So that the most real, most dangerous and most palpable threat is indeed that of the effects produced by the defence against an invisible threat.

21. 6., 13.00-18.00
Zoran Kanduč (Slovenia)
A researcher at the Criminology Institute, a doctor of jurisprudence, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Ljubljana, the author of the book Criminology: (devious) paths of knowledge about (devous) paths, co-author of Sexuality, violence, and the law, and the editor of Victims, victimization, and victimological perspectives.

Lecture: Postmodern (or "Post-Material") Values as a Hidden (and Suppressed) Threat to the Logic System of the Capitalist Society and State
If the social order is the result of (in)formal social controls, then any given society is based on a widespread network of various historically specific threats. Today societies are exposed to the intense structural violence of the capitalist system, supranational "states of capital", and American imperial power, which is marked by a tight web of state terrorism and organized crime. But along with pro-system threats (pro-capitalist and pro-militarist), there are, simultaneously, radical anti-system threats circulating in society. Despite their ever-increasing prevalence (becoming more and more globalized), these threats are still to a large extent invisible. This is not only because they are effectively abolished from respectable, serious, and responsible media, sociological and cultural production (and from the established channels of political representation), but also because they trickle out of value orientations that are too different and that can only be recognized post festum, on the basis of the actions they inspire. These postmodern or "post-material" values, which were affirmed by the postwar "cultural revolution", are ever more powerful and widespread, even in the face of the ideological counterrevolution (the neoliberal/neoconservative paradigm). These new values are the greatest threat to the capitalist status quo.

Aldo Milohnić (Slovenia)
Aldo Milohnić holds a master's degree in the sociology of culture. He has participated as a lecturer in numerous conferences on theater theory and cultural politics both in Slovenia and abroad. He is a regular contributor to the theater journals Maska (Ljubljana), Frakcija (Zagreb), and TkH (Belgrade), and has edited a number of thematic issues of these journals. He is the editor of two books, Along the Margins of Humanities (1996) and Europe's Gatekeepers: the politics of migration and asylum in Eastern Europe (2001). Since 2001, he has worked as a researcher and program director at the Peace Institute in Ljubljana, where, among other things, he edits the book series Politike. In recent years, he has devoted himself to issues surrounding migration, asylum, and human rights.

Lecture: Denunciation Unlimited

Milohnić presents the latest advances in the technology and techniques of detection of refugees who try to enter developed Western countries in unlawful ways. Today's techniques of detection of "undocumented immigrants" are juxtaposed with examples of flight over the former Berlin Wall and similar cases. Precisely the fall of the Berlin Wall is a symbolic landmark between past practices of undocumented crossings of state borders and those specific for today's situation. Refugees and dissidents become "illegal(s)", those who offer help to them (formerly called "Fluchthelfer") are now called smugglers and traffickers in human beings. Exploring possibilities for escaping the states of so-called "Real Socialism" was supported and accepted with sympathy in Western countries. In Germany it was organized even an exhibition entitled "Escape stimulates inventiveness". Nowadays one speaks only about new detection techniques and their abilities to stop "illegal migrations" which are represented (in public, in the media...) as a "treat" for reach and developed Western states. An important duty imposed to "security developers" of the Schengen Europe consists in making "visible" this ideologically constructed "invisible threat" (i.e. immigrants hidden in cars, tracks, railway coaches, and other vehicles). The author will also speak about some witty artistic projects questioning a growing isolationistic ideology of the Schengen Europe.

Sergey Kara-Murza (Russia)
Sergey Kara-Murza, born 1939, is a contemporary Russian sociologist who has, for several decades, regularly published texts in numerous Russian newspapers and journals (Pravda, Sovetskaja Rossija, Zavtra, etc.). A doctor of chemical sciences who in 1983 received a second doctoral degree in the history and methodology of science, Kara-Murza deals primarily with questions of scientific methodology and system analysis. He has written many books, such as The Manipulation of Social Consciousness, Soviet Civilization, Eurocentrism: The Hidden Ideology of Perestroika, The Intelligentsia Among the Ruins of Russia, and Ideology and Science, Its Mother, among others.
Links: http://www.kara-murza.ru

Lecture: The Manipulation of Consciousness, the Penetration of Globalization
The modern era has witnessed the divergence of two separate social types: the bourgeois (liberal, "democratic") and the traditional (group-oriented, "authoritarian"). The former is founded on the model of the marketplace, the latter on the basis of the family. For the bourgeois type, the most important means of governing is the manipulation of consciousness; for the traditional type, it is open force ("the tyrant does not manipulate; he orders"). Part of society welcomes the transition from force to manipulation; if it must be that the strongest subordinate the weakest to his will, then let him do it with a "drug," not with a "whip." Others say, however, that the "drug" is worse than the "whip," calling it "the severest and most dangerous form of totalitarianism." In his lecture, Kara-Murza speaks of a choice between two types of "tyrannies," rather than one between democracy and totalitarianism. In his view, the idea that the existence of "democratic mechanisms" guarantees a person freedom, while the absence of such mechanisms destroys it, is the fruit of naivete.