<nettime-ann> Under Fire conference Seville 24-25 Nov 06

[underfire-agent <agent@blast.org>]

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UNDER FIRE
 
conference
 
University of Seville
International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
24-25 November 2006
 
 
Presentations by Friedrich Kittler, Gema Martín Muñoz, Osfa/José Pérez de
Lama, Julian Reid, Pablo de Soto, Ana Valdés, Caleb Waldorf, and Eyal
Weizman.  Moderated by Jordan Crandall.
 
This Under Fire event generates multiple perspectives onto war and political
violence -- deriving from the fields of political science, sociology, visual
art, architecture, and media theory.  What emerges is an assemblage of
disciplinary approaches to the study of armed conflicts, functioning at the
level of both practice and theory, anchored in several key sites of
contention -- including Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq, and the
Strait of Gibraltar.
 
The conference is divided into two sessions.  The first session begins by
making the case for a biopolitical understanding of war -- or violence
understood in terms of the struggle over the political constitution of life.
Next, it inquires into the (mis)representation of Islamic culture in the
West, positioning the role that such representations play in the
construction of otherness and the perpetuation of conflicts in the Middle
East. And finally, it deconstructs the codes of suspicion, showing how a
heightened sense of vigilance, generated by security culture, infiltrates
contemporary ways of seeing.  The second session inquires into the
intersections of combat operations, urban space, and discourse -- delving
into the Israeli military's appropriation of poststructuralist theory in
urban warfare.  Following from this event's geographical specificity in
southern Spain, it then presents tactical mappings of the Strait of
Gibraltar, positioning the Strait as representative of larger global
transformations and exploring the possibilities of counter-reconnaissance.
And finally, it looks at the reality of hardware and communications
networks, deriving from western military apparatus, provoking understandings
of military operations in terms of their media-technological
infrastructures. 
 
Under Fire is an ongoing art and research project that delves into the
structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions of armed conflicts. This
instantiation of Under Fire is sponsored by the International Biennial of
Contemporary Art of Seville and the University of Seville. For further
information please see http://underfire.eyebeam.org.
 
SCHEDULE
 
*FRIDAY 24 NOVEMBER*
11:00 am - 2:00 pm; 5:00 pm - 8:30 pm
University of Seville
Atula de Grados de la Facultad de Filologia
Palos de la Frontera s/n  Sevilla
 
 
SESSION I:
REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS
 
11:00 
Introduction: JORDAN CRANDALL
 
11:15
JULIAN REID, Lecturer in International Relations, King's College, London
"Biopolitics of the War on Terror"
 
12:00
GEMA MARTÍN MUÑOZ, Director of Casa Arabe and the International Institute of
Arab and Islamic Studies, Madrid
"Interpretations of Middle East Violence from Western Societies"

12:45
Respondent: ANA VALDÉS
 
1:00
Discussion
 
1:30
CALEB WALDORF
"Ecologies of Suspicion"
 
 
SESSION II:
THEORY, TACTICS, AND HARDWARE
 
5:00
EYAL WEIZMAN, Architect, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture,
Goldsmiths College, University of London
"Tactics of Lesser Evil"
 
5:45
PABLO DE SOTO, collaborator, hackitectura.net
OSFA/JOSÉ PÉREZ DE LAMA, collaborator, hackitectura.net; Associate
Professor, University of Seville School of Architecture
"Tactical Cartography of the Straits"
 
6:30
Respondent: ANA VALDÉS
 
6:45
Discussion
 
7:15
FRIEDRICH KITTLER, Professor of Media History and Aesthetics, Humboldt
University, Berlin
"Love Under Fire"
 
8:00 
Respondent: JORDAN CRANDALL
 
 
*SATURDAY 25 NOVEMBER*
11:00 am - 2:00 pm
Atarazanas
International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
 
 
Roundtable discussions:
 
JORDAN CRANDALL
FRIEDRICH KITTLER
OSFA/JOSÉ PÉREZ DE LAMA
GEMA MARTÍN MUÑOZ 
JULIAN REID
ANA VALDÉS 
CALEB WALDORF
EYAL WEIZMAN
 
 
 
Biographies
 
Friedrich A. Kittler is a literary scientist and a media theorist. His works
relate to media, technology, and the military. He is Professor of Media
History and Aesthetics at Humboldt University-Berlin's Institute for
Aesthetics. In 1993, he received the media arts prize for theory from the
ZKM Karlsruhe (Zentrums für Kunst und Medientechnologie); from 1995 to 1997,
he headed a Federal Research Group on Theory and History of Media. His
recent books include Eine Kulturgeschichte der Kulturwissenschaft (2000),
Vom Griechenland (With Cornelia Vismann - 2001), and Optische Medien (2002).
Earlier books include Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (1987); Gramaphone,
Film, Typewriter (1986); Literature, Media, Information Systems (1997).
 
Gema Martín Muñoz is Director of Casa Arabe and the International Institute
of Arab and Islamic Studies in Madrid. She has a PhD in Arabic and Islamic
Studies and carried out the postgraduate studies in Cairo University (Egypt)
for three years and numerous research stays in Algeria, Morocco, Tunis,
Jordan, Iran, Israel and Palestinian Territories. She has been visiting
Professor in Harvard University, Roma Tre University, Colegio de Mejico, La
Habana University, Institut for Political and International Studies (IPIS)
of Teherán (Irán). Her research interests include the sociopolitical
situations in Middle East countries; Islamist movements and Muslims in
Europe. She is editor of Islam, Modernism and the West: Cultural and
Political Relations at the End of the Millennium (1999) and author of Arab
State: Crisis of Legitimacy and Islamist Reactions (2000) and Iraq, a
Failure of the West (2003). She is also the author of various publications,
including: Aprender a conocerse, Percepciones sociales y culturales entre
España y Marruecos (Madrid: Fundación Repsol-Fondation Hassan II pour les
Marocains Résidant à l'Étranger, 2001); El Estado Árabe: Crisis de
legitimidad y contestación islamista (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra,
2000); El Islam y el Mundo Árabe: Guía didáctica para profesores y
formadores (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Agencia Española de Cooperación
Internacional, ICMA, 1996, 2nd edition 1998); Mujeres, desarrollo y
democracia en el Magreb (Madrid: Ediciones Pablo Iglesias, 1995).
 
José Pérez de Lama, aka osfa is an architect and Associate Professor at the
University of Seville School of Architecture. With Sergio Moreno and Pablo
de Soto, he forms the core of hackitectura.net
<http://hackitectura.net/escuelas> , a collaborative network that undertakes
practical and theoretical research into the emerging territories of
information and communication technologies, new social networks and the
traditional physical space. hackitectura.net has produced such events as la
multitud conectada (³the connected multitude², La Rábida, Huelva, 2003) and
fadaiat 2004 and 2005 (Tarifa - Tangiers). It also took part actively in
Euro May-Day-Sur 05, and promotes Indymedia Estrecho.
 
Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at King's College,
London.  He taught previously at the University of Sussex and the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He holds a PhD in Politics from the
University of Lancaster, an MPhil in International Political Economy from
the University of Amsterdam, and a BA in War Studies from King¹s College
London. He is the author of The Biopolitics of the War on Terror, to be
published in the Reappraising the Political series (edited by Jon Simons and
Simon Tormey) in late 2006 by Manchester University Press. He is currently
working on a second book, The Liberal Way of War, which focuses on the
relations between war, liberalism, and biology
 
Pablo de Soto is a researcher and practioner in fields of media-architecture
and social cybernetics. With Sergio Moreno and José Pérez de Lama, he forms
the core of hackitectura.net <http://hackitectura.net/escuelas>, a
collaborative network that undertakes practical and theoretical research
into the emerging territories of information and communication technologies,
new social networks and the traditional physical space. hackitectura.net has
produced such events as /la multitud conectada/ (³the connected multitude²,
La Rábida, Huelva, 2003) and /fadaiat/ 2004 and 2005 (Tarifa - Tangiers). He
promotes the Technology Observatory the Straits and and has recently
finished a collaborative book about Fadaiat: freedom of movement, freedom of
knowlodge. He is collaborator of Aminima new media art magazine and is now
directing "Emergent Geographies", second edition of Technology, Creativity
and Society in Extremadura.
 
Ana Valdés is a writer, an activist and a social anthropologist, working in
the space between texts, images and social networks. She has been active in
the fields of art, literature and activism for many years, driving together
with the visual artist Cecilia Parsberg the artist run network Equator,
http://this.is/Equator <http://this.is/Equator> . Her latest project is
called Crusading, the investigation of the meeting between Islam and
Christianity, http://www.crusading.se <http://www.crusading.se/> .
 
Caleb Waldorf is an artist currently pursuing his MFA in the Visual Arts
Department at the University of California, San Diego. Caleb graduated in
2001 from the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied the History of Art
and Religious Studies. From 2002 to 2004 he worked at Brown University's
Watson Institute for International Studies <http://www.watsoninstitute.org/>
where he was an Events Coordinator and a Researcher for the Information,
Technology, War and Peace <http://infopeace.org/>  project. Caleb¹s artwork
and research focuses on representation, the aesthetics of information
technology, and violence. He explores how the politics of vision shape and
are shaped by cultural, technological, and discursive forces as well as how
the body/spectator/observer is a continuing confluence of these multitudes.
His current research looks at the intersection of terrorism, personal media
and subject formation in the United States post-9/11.

Eyal Weizman is an Architect and Director of the Centre for Research
Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London.  His architectural
projects include the rebuilding of the Ashdod Museum of Art, stage sets for
the theatre, and several prizes in architectural competitions. Weizman has
worked with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine.
The exhibition and the publication A Civilian Occupation, The Politics of
Israeli Architecture he co-edited/curated was based on his human-rights
research. These projects were banned by the Israeli Association of
Architects, but later shown in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco,
Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. Weizman has taught, lectured and organised
conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include The Politics
of Verticality [forthcoming with Verso Press], A Civilian Occupation,
Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals,
magazines and books. Weizman is now a Contributing Editor for Domus Magazine
(Milan) and for Cabinet Magazine (New York).
 


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