All posts by zap-editor

11. you tickle, therefore I am

c. Raymond Tallis, on tickling

ON TICKLING

Raymond Tallis, Johan Grimonprez, Shadow World Productions, LLC
2017, 7 min 53 sec

In this short film by Johan Grimonprez, British neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing notion that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves, Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others. Shouldn’t Descartes’ first tenet “I think, therefore I am” rather be: we dialogue, therefore we are? A view underscored by the observation that many sensations can only be triggered by others. Images of a heated television-debate on the war in Syria, during which two speakers angrily thrust a table at each other, illustrate that aggression, like tickling, requires two parties.

12. who owns the future

c. Michio Kaku & Stephen Hawking, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate

THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE DEBATE

Michio Kaku & Stephen Hawking, Larry King Live, CNN
2010, 7 min 21 sec

Stephen Hawking gives his insight on Extraterrestrial Life. A panel of specialists and believers, such as Michio Kaku, elaborate on Hawking’s intel and discuss the issue more thorough.

09. sharing circles, (e)conomy & doughnut economies

d. Edgar Cahn, Time Banking

TIME BANKING

Edgar Cahn, Nesta, UK
2011, 7 min 11 sec

Dr Edgar Cahn, professor of law and founder of Time Banking, explains the concept of Time Banking. As another medium of exchange, another kind of money, Time Banking allows us to help others and, in return, get the help we need, create a interdependent community and oppose the system of money and barter, which leeds to purely commercial transactions.

In the system we use now, one of money and barter, abundance equals worthless, so every capacity we have as a human being is devalued as worthless because it’s abundant.

Time Banking is about universal values of exchanges, relationships, collaborative efforts that are abundant in the nature of human beings. Time Banking varies the medium of exchange and changes the characteristics and alters the dynamics.

Time banking is a system that let’s people earn time credits for providing services to others in their communities. Examples of services include mowing lawns, babysitting, providing household help or driving someone to a medical appointment. People can then spend their time credits for others services provided by member of the community.

They can turn their time into a ‘currency’ that let’s them meet basic needs that cannot be met through markets.

 

 

03. zombie ontology

e. The Barefoot College

THE BAREFOOT COLLEGE

Responsible Business, www.barefootcollege.org
2011, 6 min 38 sec

Established in 1972, the Barefoot College is a non-government organization that has been providing basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities for more than 40 years, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable. These Barefoot solutions can be broadly categorized into the delivery of solar electrification, clean water, education, livelihood development (health care, rural handicrafts and communication) and activism.

04. other, a hesitant smile

e. Don Featherstone, Babakiueria

BABAKIUERIA

Don Featherstone, Australia
1986, 29 min, 20 sec

Babakiueria (also known under the video-title Babakiueria (Barbeque Area)) is a 1986 Australian satirical film on relations between Aboriginal Australians and Australians of European descent. Babakiueria revolves around a role-reversal, whereby it is Aboriginal Australians who have invaded and colonised the fictitious country of Babakiueria, a land that has long been inhabited by white natives, the Babakiuerians. (Note that the capital K spelling used above is incorrect.) The opening scene depicts a group of Aboriginal Australians in military uniforms coming ashore in a land they have not previously been to. In this land, they discover a number of European Australians engaged in stereotypical European Australian activities. The Aboriginal Australian explorers approach the group and the expedition’s leader asks them, “What do you call this place”? One of the Europeans replies, “Er… ‘Barbecue Area'”. After around 200 years of Aboriginal occupation, white Australians have become a minority. Aboriginal people have assumed power, taken all of the available land and have mostly confined whites to suburban ghettos. They are expected to follow the laws and customs of the colonisers and their lifestyle is seen through the patronizing eyes of the majority culture. The latest manifestation of this is in a ‘documentary’ presented by Duranga Manika (Michelle Torres). The remainder of the film follows Duranga Manika as she observes how white people are disempowered through poverty, are treated unfairly by the police – often with brutality and indifference, experience arbitrary dispossession, government inaction on white issues, white tokenism, white children being taken from their families only to be taught the values of the majority culture and white people being relocated because the government needs their home for “something”. White people are now often characterized by society and in the media as lazy, unintelligent and untrustworthy and anyone who protests about the current circumstances is labeled as a ‘troublemaker’. White rituals and cultural values are derided and dismissed as violent and meaningless. The Babakiuerian government’s paternalistic policies are defended by Wagwan, the Minister for White Affairs (Bob Maza) who was based on the then Premier of Queensland, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The inversion of reality in Babakiueria highlights the unfairness of Australia’s past and present Aboriginal policies and the entrenched racism in society. This subversion of normality allows viewers to see what is wrong when one group tries to control and dominate another and questions the fairness of the current power structure in Australia.

06. the thought police

d. Craig Baldwin, Sonic Outlaws

SONIC OUTLAWS

Dir. Craig Baldwin, USA
1995, 1 min 25 sec

“In 1991 the Bay Area collage band Negativland was sued by Island Records for infringement of U2’s copyright and trademark.”

Craig Baldwin (b. 1952) has been making subversive experimental films from cannibalized 16mm “found” footage since the late 1970s. His works have always incorporated pseudo-documentarian gestures – such as his seminal Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991), which presents a satirical revisionist history of CIA interventionism in Latin America – but to date, Sonic Outlaws is his only actual documentary.

Rushing to support Negativland in their struggle against Island, Baldwin uses their legal troubles as a launching point into a larger conversation about appropriation, copyright law, and political activism, connecting these practices to their antecedents as well as their mainstream contemporaries.

Featuring interviews with artists Negativland, John Oswald, Emergency Broadcast Network, and The Tape Beatles, Baldwin’s film stands as an artifact of the golden age of “culture jamming,” as well as a record of the cultural moment when the legal concept of Fair Use first began to assert itself into the popular consciousness.

We are now at a point where the re-mix has become a firmly established form of artistic expression, but copyright laws still haven’t caught up. In today’s era of copyright trolls and DMCA takedown notices, Sonic Outlaws remains an incredibly important document of the litigious culture industry and a fiery call to reform a hopelessly outdated legal system.

07. transition town

d. Ron Finley, A guerrilla gardener …

A GUERILLA GARDENER IN SOUTH CENTRAL LA

Ron Finley, TED Talks
2003, 10 min 30 sec

Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

08. on bio-piracy & guerrilla gardening

d. Vandana Shiva, Seeding Deep Democracy

SEEDING DEEP DEMOCRACY

Vandana Shiva, Ecological Options Network, India
2008, 5 min 59 sec

Scientist, activist and author, Vandana Shiva, talks about the importance of saving non-GMO seeds and her concept of Earth Democracy. “The desire to save seeds comes from an ethical urge to defend life’s evolution”, says Vandana Shiva. “In India 150.000 farmers have committed suicide in areas where they have to buy seeds every year from Monsanto at a very high cost.” In response to this, community seed banks were created to collect, multiply and distribute seeds according to the farmers’ needs. She explains what Earth Democracy entails: “It’s a democracy that is related to the earth. It’s practiced best close to the earth, where you live, in your everyday life. We are first citizens of the earth.