ARTICLE 12: WAKING UP IN A SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10379/1/article-12-waking-up-in-a-surveillance-society

ARTICLE 12: WAKING UP IN A SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

Presented as part of the London International Documentary Festival at the Barbican, 'Article 12' is a provocative documentary that seeks to expose the threat to human freedoms and rights posed by increasing global surveillance. Directed by Juan Manuel Biaiñ and featuring interviews with leading academic Noam Chomsky and musician Brian Eno amongst others, Article 12 takes its name from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the twelfth article of which states mans right to privacy.

With London ranked as one of the most surveilled cities in world, this compelling exposé provides an eye-opening debate on the potency of surveillance from its voyeuristic effects on mankind to the incurred social control of populations. In these times of increased dependence on computer-mediated communications, where our moves are easily tracked, Article 12 serves as warning of a potential cultural catastrophe, which could see the future slip into an Orwellian society of mass surveillance and depleted personal and political freedoms. We spoke with director, Juan, to find out more…

Dazed Digital: Where did you get the idea for the documentary? Is surveillance an issue that you personally feel strongly about?
Juan Manuel Biaiñ: Yes I feel very strongly about surveillance and privacy. The years I worked in IT gave me a deeper understanding of the vulnerabilities of the computer world and the scope for surveillance - everything is programmed in such a way that it will always leave a trace. We deal with it today with the Apple Iphone and Google Android tracking devices that record the users' every day activities and send that information to tertiary companies.

I also feel strongly about these issues because as an Argentinean, I remember the times we were under military prosecution and when the right to privacy was systematically violated resulting in the large-scale erosion of personal liberties and ultimately, to mass victimisations, persecutions and death. This made me think about the effects of surveillance per se and also of who is behind it and ultimately motivated me to make this movie.

DD: Can you take us through your creative process?
Juan Manuel Biaiñ:  I just develop the projects that I feel passionate about. In general, I follow political and social issues in the attempt to make a difference and create a dialogue between the contributors to the film and the public. 

DD: How potentially harmful do you think mass surveillance could be to our society?
Juan Manuel Biaiñ: That depends on the country and, most importantly, on who has the power. Here in London there are cameras all over the place and all the electronic communication is recorded. So, in some cases, you can say this makes you feel safer; but, essentially surveillance or the lack of privacy changes how people feel and interact. In the end, we need to think about who runs this surveillance society? Governments change and people change, so we need regulations to prevent these kinds of things. I think it is time we thought about the creation of the Digital Habeas Corpus.

DD: Any advice you could give to fledgling documentary makers?
Juan Manuel Biaiñ: If you have an idea that you feel strongly about, keep it and dedicate yourself to making it happen.

DD: Would you agree that most people have a generally nonchalant attitude towards the abridgements of privacy that take place everyday?
Juan Manuel Biaiñ: Yes, I agree and I think that is a problem that we need to address as soon as possible. For that reason I made Article 12: to raise awareness, to make people talk about this, and to give a perspective over the current state of surveillance and privacy. This is just the first step to bringing about social change.

DD: In your opinion, what can we do as individuals to sustain a free world?
Juan Manuel Biaiñ: The existence of our digital personas is a fact; they are mirrored representations of the physical personas to which they should have a direct and singular connection. Existing laws regulating our digital movement and our digital personas have not been established properly yet. What is valid, however, is that in most cases, they have direct impact over our physical lives. Companies and governments decide whether we are eligible for mortgages, loans and life and health insurances by accessing data about our digital personas.

Other people are discriminated against based on the same criterion. Persons have become pure exchange tools on a market where power is the currency. The first step is to take ownership of our data – our representation in the digital world – irrespective of race, social status, or religion. Consequently, this asks for the creation of a regulatory body – the Digital Habeas Corpus.

LUIS DOURADO

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10197/1/rise-luis-dourado

RISE: LUIS DOURADO 

The Portuguese illustrator and visual artist is launching a one-man assault on realism through fantastical and mysterious sci-fi tinged compositions

Barcelona-based, Oporto-born Luis Dourado creates fantastical and mysterious sci-fi tinged compositions. The illustrator and visual artist works primarily with photomontage to produce pieces that turn reality on its head. Manipulating images to the point that they take on a new and almost hallucinatory form, his vivid and abstract digital collages strike a disorientating chord. Famous faces are obscured, dismantled and reconstructed in geometric designs and black and white photos of times forgotten take on new life with an injection of digitally-imposed, rainbow-hued auras.

Shifting between different mediums and choosing whichever he feels best to explore themes of control, memory and illusion, Luis’ surreal work combines contrasts of retro and modern, analogue and digital, tradition and technology. Dazed Digital caught up with Luis in Barcelona…

Dazed Digital: How would you describe your style?
Luis Dourado: I think my style varies a little bit from series to series but it is always connected; crossing a couple of techniques such as collage, manipulation, and drawing. I do prefer to "touch" a couple of different aesthetics and try to create links between works using ambiences, usually dark and dreamy.

DD: Having lived in Oporto, Berlin and Barcelona, which city would you say has most nurtured your creativity?
Luis Dourado: I think every city gives you a completely different input. Oporto and Barcelona have always been places in which I work with comfort. My last winter in Berlin was quite a surprise; something fresh and really interesting that somehow fitted the kind of artworks I usually create. The winter was very dark, cold, I spent a lot of time at home and that exercise made me come even closer to the pieces I was working on and that really stimulated me.

DD: When creating your art, does your preference lie with analogue or digital methods? Do you feel that with digital you lose a certain intimacy?
Luis Dourado: I think both analogue and digital methods are valid and wonderful to explore; but I’ll never choose only one. I like to spend time with objects and work with analogue techniques that are always more intimate than the digital ones. Still, I think that with digital you can go really "trippy" and explore sci-fi, surreal aesthetics; reaching results you would never get from analogue, but if I could do it without using the computer I would.

DD: Any medium you haven’t tried yet, but would like to?
Luis Dourado: Yes, many actually! I would love to try installation. I do have a lot of ideas that somehow search to come out from the paper and become 3D. I’m now working on a new series pretty much tri-dimensional inside a digital print; I think it would be lovely to try that out in a room with objects.

DD: Does your art carry a message?
Luis Dourado: I don’t think it’s a message but rather a common visual "experience". All the series search for strange places and try to present surreal "truths". It’s funny because once a friend told me that my works were kind of "still nightmares" and I never saw my pieces as something "evil", but yes, something dark and magical somehow...

DD: Eyes, or rather the lack of, seem to feature enormously in your work. Are you ommetaphobic?
Luis Dourado: Haha, no! I think that removing the eyes usually brings out the dark atmosphere and energy in someone. I also get the feeling that after taking the eyes out, a new character is revealed and it’s exactly this "new" one that I’m interested in. 

DD: Any works in progress?
Luis Dourado: I’m now mainly working in my new personal series "Domains", "Body Crying" and "Untitled Love Series" from which I posted a couple of pieces online. I’m also preparing my first book with originals, maybe for the end of the year. Meanwhile I’m collaborating with other artists and initiatives with my own work; I’m really interested in finding new contexts and ways to share them.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

http://www.somethinkblue.com/article_detail.php?article_id=361

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Documenting the people who live underneath Las Vegas.

Las Vegas, city of lost wages and languishing morals, is so fervently dedicated to gambling that it is now home to a staggering 1700 gaming venues. Rising up from the vast and dusty Mojave Desert, Sin City is a scintillating, multi-fluorescent hub of activity; a harsh contrast to the eerie inertia of the barren, arid hinterlands of Nevada. It’s brash display of tawdry opulence, coupled with a love for liquor, gluttony and commercial sex render it the ultimate adult playground, and considering this clear monomania for debasement, it’s a wonder what manner of men are actually able to reside in this cultureless metropolis. 

In a series of revealing images, LA-based, Manchester-born photographer Austin Hargrave captures the lives of several Las Vegas residents, but certainly not the kind you’d imagine; delving deep into Sin City’s underground, Hargrave and his camera shed shocking light on a community that is both socially and geographically withdrawn.

10ft below the kaleidoscopic carpets of Caesars Palace, in the subterranean recesses, lives the pariah of this shining city; a homeless community rumoured to be 700-strong. An underground populace has long been acknowledged as a merely fictional phenomenon, thanks to celluloid portrayals such as Luc Besson’s ‘Subway’ and Virgil Vogel’s ‘The Mole People’ whose subterranean protagonists are either callous criminals or monstrous mutants. But Las Vegas’ damp underbelly plays host to a wide range of individuals – those who’ve found themselves in unfortunate situations, addicts and alcoholics, as well as innocent folk who’ve lost their way. Unsurprisingly, many rely upon Sin City’s gambling glory to make a living, spending their days endlessly credit hustling.

Cool, dark and bare, the 200-mile labyrinth of flood tunnels populated by this society couldn’t be a more powerful example of the extremities that co-exist in the Western world if it tried. And yet, whilst the two worlds oppose, they also run parallel; like the midnight chancers that pace the casino floors on the Vegas strip above, the denizens of the underground are also playing roulette; with their own lives. Day in day out this secretive community exposes itself to the perils of the storm drains that include flash flooding and venomous black widow spiders lurking in the shadowy crevices. The Nevada heavens rarely open, but when they do, they can be deadly; in the past few years alone, a tragic amount of drownings have occurred. Most astonishing of all are the living arrangements inside the tunnels; spaces are furnished with beds, wardrobes and shelving units, and contain many of the mod-cons of present-day living like showers and stereos. As beneficial as these storm drains may be in providing shelter and privacy, this earthly divide between the city’s ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ could well prove to be majorly detrimental to support that this lost community badly needs; ‘outta sight, outta mind’.

HARMONY KORINE RETROSPECTIVE

PAMELA DES BARRES: THE LIFE OF A ROCK 'N' ROLL GROUPIE

http://www.somethinkblue.com/article_detail.php?article_id=330

PAMELA DES BARRES: THE LIFE OF A ROCK 'N' ROLL GROUPIE

“I rushed home from school every day to throb along to Mick while he sang ‘I’m a king bee baby, let me put it in’ [...] Someday I will touch and feel him, I know it. Mick my dear, dear PENIS!’’

Pamela Des Barres was not the first virtuous schoolgirl in heat to be giddy and lovesick for rock n roll and its idols. She certainly proved to possess cosmic clairvoyant capabilities, though, as within the space of few years she would be seducing a myriad of rock deities, including her delectable teen-dream Mick Jagger. Like many of the post-war baby boomers growing up in the sixties, Pamela was catapulted from traditional suburbia to its antithesis; radical and unorthodox hippiedom. It was no surprise then, that the vocation she pursued was as one of the first and most famous groupies. Now a published author, Pamela has released a set of memoirs that recount her adventures as an original groupie and share her unique experiences of what it was like to be part of a generation that threw caution to the wind.

THE WEST IS THE BEST

The first (and best) of Pamela’s memoirs to chronicle her super groupie past, ‘I’m With The Band’, is a deeply personal foray into her involvement with the Laurel Canyon music scene of the late 1960's. Affectionately named ‘Gods Golden Backyard’, The Laurel Canyon neighbourhood of Los Angeles achieved considerable notoriety as the epicentre of the heady ‘hippie’ counterculture movement. At a time when the incensed Californian air was heavy with protest and moral drama, and significant cultural shifts were beginning to take shape, an impressionable, doe-eyed Pamela found herself in the eye of a very trippy storm. Spending her formative years at seminal music bar Whisky a Go Go, the beating heart of the burgeoning hippie movement, she made the acquaintance of musicians such as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Love. Pamela later met two incredibly forward thinking musicians who would change the course of her life forever; Captain Beefheart and creative mentor of her groupie group (the GTO’s), Frank Zappa. Pamela’s narrative gives a delicious, acid-hazed snapshot of the hippie lifestyle; the thrill of being part of the first generation to rebel, to taste sexual liberation and to expand its consciousness. Beautifully unapologetic, ‘I’m With The Band’ shines an unflinching light onto the groupie phenomenon; Pamela gives a detailed account of a free-love lifestyle wild enough to shake the palms on the Sunset Strip. The Golden State’s groupie supreme dallied, fellated and fucked her way through what seems like an endless list of revered rock royalty; Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Jim Morrison, Robert Plant, Keith Moon and Noel Redding all get a mention. Bizarrely, there remains a very innocent and vulnerable element to her character, even as she casually recalls some of the more shocking anecdotes from her past such as Jimmy Page’s S&M penchant and Chuck Berry’s No. 2 fetish. Let it be remembered, however, that this chapter in history was not merely a fornication free-for-all, and that the ideals of the movement ran deeper than sexual promiscuity.  The fervently anti-authoritarian hippie movement advocated a total rejection of the stagnant, conservative American values and outdated ideas that existed, in favour of peace, communalism and sexual freedom. At long last colour exploded into the dull grey landscape of post-war America. Love was ubiquitous, emotional utopia close...

A LIBERAL REBELLION

Love them or loathe them, no historian could deny the profound impact that hippies and their far-out philosophy made on the Western world. There are of course those who will refute that it was in any way positive, insisting the movement was nothing more than a series of events perpetrated by a purple-hazed youth, which spawned negative consequences for society such as the popularisation of drugs. The hypocritical Nicolas Sarkozy once blamed the sixties for ‘a crisis of morality’, yet without this decade, the twice-divorced French president almost certainly wouldn’t be president at all. The Sixties movement stood for freedom, equality and acceptance of diversity and their ethics remain to this day. We are indebted to the counterculture movement for the many freedoms we now have; it was a time that created a rising consciousness of homosexuality and bisexuality, of gender roles and racism. However, it’s perhaps true, also, that the liberal ideals of the movement were a double edged sword and that ideas of changing the world for the better were actually counterproductive. Is the flower power generation in some way accountable for the present-day ‘Me’ generation? The ‘Me’ generation, or its alternative Apple-inspired moniker the ‘iGeneration’? It seems that nowadays morality is a choice, not a duty.

That said, it would be impossible and ignorant to classify the status quo as being wholly symptomatic of a single movement. Disregarding the positive or negative consequences, what the hippie movement essentially did was contest authority, an action always worthy of great applause. Those who are willing to challenge authority are imperative to society - and such a generation has seldom been more essential than it is in the post-recession era of privatisation and impending plutocracy.

To end on a - legally - high note, rumours are a-circulating of a film adaptation of ‘I’m With The Band’, with Zooey Deschanel touted to play Pamela, if the film is anywhere near as impressive as the book, it’ll be a box smash.