Why Wikileaks is an art project by V.Vale

1. MESSAGE FROM YOUR EDITOR, V. VALE: Earlier we advocated, "Give Pfc Bradley Manning The Nobel Prize!"As our specialty is TRULY ALTERNATIVE HISTORY & CREATIVITY, just for fun we will now advocate that WikiLeaks, probably all along, has been THE MOST IMPORTANT **ART PROJECT** OF OUR TIMES (late 2010-2011).

So: Why is WikiLeaks an ART PROJECT? 10 Reasons...

1. The INTERNET is the most important NEW ART TERRITORIALITY encompassing the dimensions of TIME and IMMEDIATE REFLEXIVITY, whose aesthetics & technologies are slowly being deduced, deconstructed, reconstructed and recombined...

2. Art Makes You Think, Redefine, Recategorize, Reassess, Recontextualize, & Reevaluate. Art Changes the Way You Look at the World. Art Changes the Way you Draw Boundaries, the way you Frame "Reality." So does WikiLeaks.

3. What WikiLeaks has exposed makes one REthink the entire media/communications landscape, and illuminates the tropes of the backroom secrecy that has dominated politics since the world began.

4. Art questions power dynamics, power relationships, and exposes hidden agendas and imperatives while adding emotional/aesthetic backgrounding. Gericault's painting of "The Raft of the Medusa" illuminated and immortalized a scandalous cover-up of the time; WikiLeaks exposes manifold cover-ups of our time which go viral.

5. WikiLeaks represents a populist, bottom-up, information-sharing technology revolution reflecting the Do-It-Yourself, Anyone-Can-Do-It Punk Principle. Punk Rock was the social-critical art movement of its time, and WikiLeaks is continuing that imperative...

6. Art predicts, foreshadows and adumbrates future social change, and so, hopefully, does WikiLeaks.

7. Duchamp stated that "The Spectator completes the Work of Art." Numerous spectator/contributors continuously are completing the ongoing Art Project that is WikiLeaks...

8. New technologies make New Art possible. If the Internet is today's most futuristic art medium, then WikiLeaks embodies the cutting edge of art criticism and theory, but from an Empiricist rather than neo-Platonic orientation...

9. WikiLeaks embodies a crazy-quilt, non-centrist, satirical-sardonic public facade, just as 21st-Century Art is characterized by continuous border-crossings and new hybrid-forms embodying dark humor and philosophical skepticism...

10. The purpose of Art is to Inspire, Enliven, Enlighten and Expand Aesthetics. That's exactly what WikiLeaks does by the sheer, perplexing beauty of its Anti-Authority, Anti-Totalitarian Information Revolution-Which-Anyone-Can-Contribute-To...

My work

If I just keep prying things, this whole thing might fall apart. Or else nothing will happen, again. No one saw me prying. I was hiding because I knew other people who really know the hows and whys of prying would just laugh at me and my last of strategy for bringing the whole thing down. So while I am prying, I am covering up my work with my forearm, ever so subtly, just in case an expert comes by and shows me a better way. That would be the worst. Because then they would save me from all this prying, which was supposed to take all my energy for the next long while, which is so much better than finishing this prying, bringing the whole thing down, and being left with nothing to do, and a false sense of accomplishment. I want to feel the process of discovery within the bringing of this shit to its knees, but the truth is that I know that other people are already working on it and doing a great job. And they really enjoy the work. They’ve invited all their friends to help them, and they are drinking coronas while they chip away—they are celebrating because they have almost finished. I hope they don’t see me, because my progress is so slow, and I would be so embarrassed that I thought I would do all this work myself. I just got here with this screwdriver and I started wedging it into shit, and I assumed that I would finish, somehow, though I hadn’t visualized the way that that would happen. Maybe I don’t know what it is to finish prying things off, but it’s probably not going to make that big of a difference either way. I just wanted something to keep myself busy with, with a sense of progress and great benefits until I am done working.

Telling Time To Go Back

What is it. It is imagined, it is not anything.

na·tion

/ˈneɪʃən/ Show Spelled[ney-shuhn] Show IPA

–noun

1.

a large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own: The president spoke to the nation about the new tax.

2.

the territory or country itself: the nations of Central America.

3.

a member tribe of an American Indian confederation.

4.

an aggregation of persons of the same ethnic family, often speaking the same language or cognate languages.

coun·try

/ˈkʌntri/ Show Spelled [kuhn-tree] Show IPA noun, plural -tries, adjective

–noun

1.

a state or nation: What European countries have you visited?

2.

the territory of a nation.

3.

the people of a district, state, or nation: The whole country backed the president in his decision.

4.

the land of one's birth or citizenship.

5.

rural districts, including farmland, parkland, and other sparsely populated areas, as opposed to cities or towns: Many city dwellers like to spend their vacations in the country.

6.

any considerable territory demarcated by topographical conditions, by a distinctive population, etc.: mountainous country; the Amish country of Pennsylvania.

7.

a tract of land considered apart from any geographical or political limits; region; district.

8.

the public.

9.

Law . the public at large, as represented by a jury.

10.

country music.

My belly was my sun-dial

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions. When I was a boy,
My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when twas prper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat.
But now-a-days, why even when I have,
I can't fall-to, unless the sun give leave.
The greater part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets!

Plautus (d. 184 B.C.)
p. 28 of The Discoverers, Daniel Boorstin

There is nothing left for imagination

Sympathies, an open proposal.

Open proposal: Sympathies, an event that is aware of so many other events.

Sympathy is:
1. Sameness of feeling
2. action or response arising from this
3. agreement in qualities, harmony, accord
4. a mutual liking or understanding arising from the sameness of feeling



Sympathies are:
Events where we gather to show our fiercest sympathy. We hold signs without words. The posterboard and the language is replaced by mirrors. We amble, we look, we sympathize.

Don't think Hallmark Card Sympathy, think about how you feel about
Egyptian Revolutionaries, Wisconsin Workers, Planned Parenthood Supporters.
Question the 'form' of 'protest' in your life. How do you deal with the savageness that so many other people experience when you are comfortable, and maybe even happy?
Is it possible to design a new form for our own rebellion?

How. As training, I would like to hold a series of walks for people who are captivated, frightened, worried, and unclear about what to do about so many overwhelming upheavals in the world. With mirrors as our protest signs, we will walk and think about what we are and where. We will look at things, see ourselves where we are, see what others see, and look at eachother. We show or feel sympathy for what we see when we see it, where we are. Meanwhile we think of those who are breaking, or almost broken, revolting against forces as big as nations and tsunamis. For many people who are only surviving recent events, there is no meanwhile to take notice of, meanwhile is a privilege. Let us celebrate the meanwhile, offer sympathy, and focus in on the wonder and the disaster of everywhere we are.

fellow feelings, of like feelings.
1. Sameness of feeling
2. action or response arising from this
3. agreement in qualities, harmony, accord
4. a mutual liking or understanding arising from the sameness of feeling
5. The entering into or ability to enter into another person's mental state, feelings, emotions
6. In physics, a relation or harmony between bodies of such a nature that vibrations in one cause a sympathetic vibration in the other
7. In physiology, a relation between parts of the body of such a nature that a disorder in one induces a disorder in the other
8. A supposed tendency of certain things to unite or act on eachother.