Aliens are observing the Earth. What they see: capitalism, violence, a rerun of the popular TV series 24. They decide to bring an end to all this and annihilate the human race. But just in the nick of time humanity is saved – because the aliens witness a performance piece, and decide that there is still hope for humans after all.
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Nothing is more common in ordinary experience than for information to lose its potential for activity.
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Crossing Water Street and turning right on to Front Street, walking along the back side of the 27 storey building, entering the open loading dock. Inside the garage; a security guard in uniform on his stool, a tv-monitor on his table. Behind a metal door; a temporary particle board maze, which leads to an elevator. A ride up, the door opens at number 10. A florescent light is flickering and humming. I continue through the corridor, in to my detective office.
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- Svenska

Let us step inside the recording studio. Here, the identity we call pop singer is produced. It is this dream factory which makes the voice you hear on the radio something completely other than just a human being singing.
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Back in 1999 when I first started putting together my scrapbook of literary coincidences, let's just call them that for now, I cut out parts of articles, interviews, memoirs, essays, diaries, any printed text wherein was recounted various examples of how life imitates art.
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They had cut the umbilical cord, cleaned him, weighed and measured him.
His parents had held him.
- He looks so alive, said his mother.
- The child should be crying, said his father.

Testing was done on the little body and they gave contradictory results. His heart stood still, while it grew. His body did not respond to any treatment, still his growth was normal.

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In the center of the large wall behind the desk hangs a plastic sleeve with a book inside. Judging by its colors and ornate typography, the book is evidently quite a few years old. On its cover is emblazoned an obsolete sounding title: Sagan om den Stora Datamaskinen (Eng: The Saga of the Big Computer machine. A vision by Olof Johannesson).
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The billboard proclaiming 'Jii Hutikka's Clip Karavaani!' was the beginning of 'Clip Kino' in Helsinki and beyond: a self-organised social event platform consisting of screening events in public spaces, featuring not full, or even short, film screenings, but video clips and documentaries found online.
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It is not strange then that artist Alessandra Di Pisa in her latest work Buying The Museum takes a shot at the very core of the art institution, but this time from a perspective seldom pursued by artists when she aimed at buying the actual institution, thus totally shifting the power relations.
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'When I write with my fountain pen on a sheet of paper, the friction between the metal of the pen and the surface texture of the paper makes a sound.'
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- Dutch / English

”You are a Greek statue”
a blind woman whispered in my dreams.
“This muscular body is but a suit of mourning”
I told her. Then, I kissed her and
I had her against my clothes closet.

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What follows is an unsorted, nonhierarchical and partly arbitrary selection of characters who have influenced our work. A family album, a list of usual suspects, your average perpetrators - or maybe just a side show of funny faces, assembled together from our library of eyes, noses, ears, facial hair et cetera.
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In the context of SQUID, we found out in 2008 that urban and narrative were the most common search words, or themes, used in the SQUID archive. The varieties in approaching, investigating, or tip-toeing around these themes are as many as the number of contributions. Nevertheless, we thought it was an interesting thread we had stumbled upon and felt compelled to follow up and decided to do this under the theme of Urban Narrative.
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00_ Fiat Lux. Narrative in-forms realities. It gives them a form. So that these can be recognised, narrated, historicized, represented. Narrative stands for any form of representation. The urban condition is a tangible reality that takes form with narrative, here understood as any kind of representation, visual or not.
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The current existing terminologies connected to urban space to me seems limiting in terms of understanding urban space. This has to do with the dichotomy public – private and its lack of ability to describe the complexity in society today. […] To be able to discuss and describe urban life it’s therefore necessary to find terms that is in between the public and the private.
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I have been living in Southern Kurdistan or Northern Iraq for more than six months and day after day, week after week I discover the multitude of doors that allow for perceiving the nuances of a different society.
Cooking and tasting food while sharing stories is to me a privileged access point that reveals much more than what it seems to tell.
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There were several books on the bookshelf that I was too short to reach, and one who didn’t fit amongst the others because of its size: it was being kept on the desk in the office instead. The book of chronicles. I learned to read fairly late, and I started out with this one. “The 20th century chronicles”. I was sitting with it for days on end. All through the night, secretly. The cover was a collage of scientists, presidents, celebrities, emigrants, wars and athletes. It was rather easy to grasp, well arranged with two months worth of time for every page spread: history begun in January of 1900 and ended, abruptly, in December of 1987.
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Once I asked my parents for a dictionary. I wanted the boxed kind, navy with a magnifying glass. But Dad doesn't get gratification deferral in that way, so instead I got the kind with two volumes, six columns inside. According to it, desire is both a longing and an absence. It's sexual. And desiree is a kind of potato, pink-skinned with yellow waxy flesh.
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That's it. That. That
sensation of being
fucked. Penetrated.

The fact that it's so
contradictory.

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I'm convinced that you cannot describe nature, not philosophically, nor in a scientific manner and, not in the last place, not from an aesthetic point of view either. The moment you start describing it, studying or painting it, nature is undone and becomes something different altogether: a dissertation, a story, or an art work, anything that fits into a human framework of understanding. It's a Bermuda triangle of philosophy, science and culture in which nature disappears.
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In my luggage, on my first trip to Svolvær in January 2008, I had a couple of guidebooks on the Lofoten Islands in Norway - not containing a word on what interested me the most - the migration patterns of humans and animals in the area. Humans have obviously always been on the move, despite enormous social and geographical barriers. It's a fascinating thought. Migration does, in fact, contain fantastic potential for evolution and growth, both for the individuals and for the society - economically, socially, and culturally.
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20th Century Type Coins is a radio play about two characters hoarding coins. The first - Ephraim, is a scholar, an empiricist and a diligent coin collector. The other character - Mungo, is impetuous, anti-authoritarian and a survivalist. The two characters compare sorting reports and tactics for acquiring coins based on their value as raw material.
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This "manifesto", which emerged in its first version six years ago, was initially intended to become an agitatorial sound-piece consisting of ambiguous voices in several languages. It ended up a backdrop and an insistent reminder while I was pondering other less agitatorial pieces relating to gender, gender neutrality and transgression of gender.
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The Croa River community consists of approximately four hundred families spread out across eighty thousand hectares of Amazonian forest. They aspire to see the land they inhabit become an extraction reserve, and in fact, it is in the process of becoming precisely this: one of the new territories in Acre. As such, it is a good example of the current trend toward territorialization in the Brazilian state. It is also a good example of what territories stand for: self-organization, sustainable growth, and local knowledge.
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During the last few years, I have in my art been working with the understanding of time in different ways. When I spent a few months in NYC in 2002 it became apparent to me that I often understood time as a part of space. I saw time as a variable of space, and I found it difficult to separate that which has already happened from what is happening in the present. This made me question my linear perception of time.
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Point out a compass course and make an investigation. Make it a game. Investigate the relation between you as a citizen and the resistance of the city, when you are walking a straight line, following a pre-defined compass course. Investigate what obstacles your body will meet: the air friction; other bodies; ditches you are forced to go down into and up again as they pass your way.
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Image: A very sunny late summers day at the southern coast of Sweden. On the beach a placard has been erected, 3,60 x 2,55 meters. Behind it, the sea and the sandy beach. The sun stands low and shines like a lamp on the placard. A shimmering light from the sea. The placard is painted with straight lines, in the same colors as the sky, the sea and the beach. It is quite windy and Dad is standing behind the placard, holding a rope to straighten it up. On the placard it is written:
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SQUID said they wanted me to write about that which triggers me, which makes me want to do things, create. The things that give me energy, something important to me and thus also a part of my work as an artist. I thought it would be fun to write. Exciting. Possibly demanding, but in a challenging way. I was thinking I was going to write about Seinfeld.
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Part 2 of “All Talk, No Action” (see below).
To handle and act within art today is to choose between "with us", or "against us"!! And we all know that "against us" is not really an option. There is no such thing as "against us", we are all onboard from the get go and possibly all the way to the end.
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What is the difference between practicing and preaching, and what does it have to do with themes?
- My name is Fredrik Gunve and I work as an artist. I’ve had several exhibitions,
performances, situation based happenings, installations, teaching projects, texts, and I have often been asked:
- What themes do you work with??
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Near old master Gusti Nyoman Lempad´s house
Gusti´s Pizza Delivery

So contrary to western art:
no vacant space, no omits
in physical meaning
but a vast surface for dreams

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Script of a video-letter to Thomas Hoving, former director at the MET and author of the unforgivable Art for Dummies.
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The subject is distinguished from the non-subject by the minimum of freedom to be itself, i.e. it has the freedom to defend its self in view of real unfreedom. A human being cannot be reduced to its status as mere object. It knows, as Carl Schmitt says, "not only birth," the facticity of its having been cast, "but also the possibility of a rebirth," which, as Hölderlin says in The Course of Life, is "the freedom to set out whither he will". There is therefore only one obligation for the human subject: to be free in view of its freedom.
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The common octopus, Octopus Vulgaris, can often be seen hung out to dry in the harbour of Antiparos, Greece. Low season, high tide - this is where the Swedes go for vacation, the common Swede. These two kinds of vulgaris are brought together in Greek cuisine; on the small island of Antiparos octopus is served at every tavern. We will stay here for a week, enough time to try all the vegetarian dishes on the menus twice and hopefully also enough time to find a living octopus.
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On Sept. 11 2002 a group of 80 pigeons, posing as white doves evoking peace, were released in the New York City area. It was a tribute that went quickly awry as a fundamental misunderstanding became apparent. These pigeons from a poultry market, originally destined for soup, were confused with homing pigeons- resilient birds that after release are able to navigate to homes up to 600 miles away.
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A local Zambian dance performance with African masks in variations of black and white. The children sob and roar. Their expressions of fear and their screams in a foreign language sink deep down inside me. Why the masks seem to terrify them so, I cannot understand. It is a game, but still and all, it isn't. The black children I usually play with glance at us.
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In New York's Latin quarters, "El Barrio", in east Harlem and in the Bronx, music is developed under the best possible conditions. Here the Afro-Cuban rhythms meet American jazz harmonies. It's no accident that New York is an important hub of new innovative music. To call oneself a drummer in this environment without any knowledge of clave would be a joke.
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17.09.2000. The Red Light District in Amsterdam is 700 years old and at a distance looks rather charming, with all the red lamps, cobblestones and picturesque bridges. Unaccustomed as I am to the area, I study the surroundings and watch how others act and move. Several people window-shop.
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One thing leads to another - so can the world be related. Causal connections above and beyond the easily predictable make me curious and therefore the chain of effects motif occupies an important place in my work, especially as a narrative means.
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I am a thoroughly urban person, having grown up in Tallinn, and later living in Riga, St Petersburg and New York. Nevertheless, on St John's Day in 1996 I found myself on the balcony in Kütiorg, reading Nietszche's 'Ecce Homo', realizing that cities as such has nothing more to offer me.
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- Estonian

If you look at a map of Petersburg, you will immediately see that Narvskaya Zastava is an isolated zone, surrounded by a ring of factories, railroad tracks and shipyards. Before the revolution, it was part of the city's proletarian outskirts, an historical hotbed of dissent. The historical decision to begin the October Revolution was made here.
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The first days of the experiment had been uncomfortable, claustrophobic. Imagined sounds caused him to react as if someone was just outside - knocking, steps, distant conversations. But they were only sound memories. The only thing that there was to listen to in fact was the murmuring of his own blood circulation.
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As I, in any situation where emotions are called upon, invariably turn to vocabulary to facilitate and comprehend, I also understand the arts through words. Every visual question, statement and sensation needs to pass through this internal transformer...in order for me to place it in the correct category in the winding tunnels of my comprehension to store for further interpretation.
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Notes for a book dispersed around the world
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I live in the house during the construction of the sculpture. I cut myself on bamboo sticks, bump into the large spades that poke out of the tunnels. They dig, hollow out the house to make a new existence in it. I have nowhere to sit - the chairs have either knives or bamboo fastened to them - the refrigerator is covered with staples.
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This I have come to know about home
since I began to think that I want home
to be like this

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Today there are 1,600,000 registered species on earth. It is reckoned that around 320,000 of them will have disappeared by the year 2020. Around 2050 it is assumed that every other species (800,000 species) will have vanished. What is a species worth?
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Why Michel Foucault? Because philosophy in Foucault's sense is a PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, an act of solitude. The solitude of the subject of philosophical experience has nothing to do with pathetic or narcissistic, depressive self-enclosure. The solitude of the philosophical subject is an act of resistance. The subject resists the easiness of mere opinion. It opens itself to new experiences, the EXPERIENCE OF THE NEW SELF.
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A strong dazzling sun from a cloudless blue sky. Glass facades emerge in the sunlight. A house of glass looms into view. A panning and presentation of a city constructed entirely of glass: Crystal Palace.
[...] we wish everyone a good morning. Today in room 101 we'll be showing a film on the legendary mountain, Mt. Everest, which according to our sources reaches around 8848 m. At the same time, in room 314, the classical costume drama, Room with a view, will be screened. For children, there will be a visit by a clown.
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As a result of filmic expression that has benefited from technological advances, the fusion of 'the visual' and 'the narrative' is now resulting in unprecedented forms of expression. What kinds of stories are being told by artists who have acquired the medium of 'the moving image?' How are these stories being told? The focus of this essay will be on storytelling in the medium of the moving image, which has seen a rapid growth since the mid-nineties.
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I am at an art exhibition in Germany, watching an educational fi lm on how to use a condom for protection against AIDS. The film is from South Africa. One of the women at the lesson giggles and smiles shyly, as she pulls a condom over a wooden phallus. Her friends are in stitches and the situation exudes lust and powerlessness. I am watching the film, surrounded by happy German art lovers. But they are no longer looking at the film. They are looking at me with well-meaning expressions on their faces.
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- Dansk