Using CCTV to bring down fascists

Posted by Christian

The Forensic Architecture team has release another masterful media investigation: THE MURDER OF PAVLOS FYSSAS

Here’s the quick summary. Full video linked below

 

In 2013, members of the Greek Nazi movement “Golden Dawn” murdered the antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas on the streets of Athens, a murder that was covered up by members of the Greek police, known to be riddled with Golden Dawn infiltrators, and abetted by Members of Parliament from Golden Dawn.

As the case works its way through the Greek courts, the University of London’s “Forensic Architecture” group has been called in to make sense of a welter of evidence about the crime and the cover-up, deploying their system of using “architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.”

The result is a 37 minute video that Talos on Metafilter a masterpiece of analytic exposition and impressively recreates the events surrounding the murder based on available data sources — it is.

The Fyssas trial has the potential to bring down Golden Dawn, to bring its true nature as an organized crime group into the open, to eliminate it from the Greek Parliament and to trigger a purge of Nazi elements from the Greek police. It is nothing short of seismic.

But even if you don’t care about any of that, this video is remarkable, a stitching-together of disparate and flawed evidence sources in a way that uses the strengths of one to overlap and fix the weaknesses of the other, creating a coherent and devastating story that is as well-told as any crime drama. It is truly virtuoso work.

Much of the original audio and video material was without an accurate timestamp, and it became apparent that attempts by the Greek police investigators to address this problem were insufficient. As a result, our researchers had to assess the material from scratch, and deduce the correct time and location of each piece of footage.

Audio recordings were assembled into a timed sequence through a process of sound analysis. CCTV footage from various locations around the scene was synchronised and given an accurate timestamp by reference to the sequence of audio recordings.

(via BoingBoing)

Voyeurism

Posted by Christian

In hidden corners across South Korea, tiny cameras are surreptitiously recording thousands of women when they are at their most vulnerable.

Women have come to fear that cameras could be anywhere: perched inside the toilet bowl of a public restroom, disguised as a smoke detector in a shop’s fitting room, even rolled into a plastic bag at the lip of a trash can.

In Seoul, the capital, the proliferation of such hidden cameras — and the images they record, which often end up on pornographic websites — has often been described by reporters as an epidemic.

The city announced a crackdown on Sunday, increasing the number of municipal employees assigned to search public bathrooms for hidden cameras to 8,000 in October from the 50 currently at work.

“It is to help citizens to feel safe when they use the public restrooms, free from concerns about spy cams,” the Seoul Metropolitan Government said in a statement.

The city has promised to inspect every one of its 20,554 public restrooms daily, an enormous undertaking that underscores the scope of the problem.

NY Times article

 

south-korean-women-protest-against-spy-cam-porn

Visiting artist Kerstin Ergenzinger

Posted by Christian
11:30 h
room2
Wednesday June 6 2018
Visiting sound and space artist Kerstin Ergenzinger will present her work on June 6th at 11:30h in room2.
In the new “Navigating Noise”, “Acts of Orientation” and other works, Kerstin Ergenzinger plays with the sonic as a cultural formatting of sound and more. She’s sonic and holistic and full of techno sonic knowledge.
Figuring out noise is only one side to her multi-pronged work.  The body and perception figure heavily:

“Central themes within Kerstin’s artistic investigations are the inextricable relation between the body and the world, between perception and the perceived, between sensing and sense-making.”

This special visit will include an introduction to her field of sonic architectures. She will detail her research and productions, and describe how she finds and repurposes light, sound, kinetics and traditional media towards farther thinking investigations. New notable achievements can be seen and experienced through her workin installation, electronic arts, sculpture and drawing.

Since 2016 Kerstin Ergenzingerhas been a fellow of the Berlin Center for Advanced Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin where she is working on a two year project called “Rhythmic Textures”. Recent shows include zeich[n]enKunstmuseum Bonn; Acts of Orientation, Schering Stiftung, Berlin; and unREAL: The Agorithmic Present, House of Electronic Arts, Basel and Chronus Arts Center, Shanghai.

Medienkatastrophe: Dirk Baecker – die Kunst der nächsten Gesellschaft

Posted by Christian

Dirk Baecker on media revolutions and the one we’re currently in. What does it mean for art and the arts when machines start to take part in the communication between humans? What does it mean if you can begin to observe something akin to communication between machines?

As a sociologist, he has written extensively on the subject. See i.e. here or here (in German).

Prof. Dr Dirk Baecker is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Arts at Witten/Herdecke University and holds a Chair of Culture Theory and Management. Among his key research interests are sociological theory, economic sociology, organisational research and management theories.  Baecker underlines the profound structural and cultural implications of electronic media – from telegraph, radio and TV to computers and the internet – for humans and society, comparable to the introduction of book printing (“modern society”), writing (“advanced civilisations”), and language (“tribal cultures”). According to Baecker, we live in the “next” society, with tremendous distortions between different stages of socio-cultural evolution. *

Tuesday, May 15, 19h, KHM Aula. The talk will be recorded.

https://www.khm.de/termine/news.4311.medienkatastrophe-dirk-baecker-die-kunst-der-naechsten-gesellschaft/

 

poster by Nikolai