Rachel Greene
Since the beginning
Works in New York, Nebraska United States of America

BIO
Rhizome is friends and family for Rachel, who has been involved with the org. in one capacity or another since 1997 when it was rhizome.com!!
Rachel wrote a book on internet art for thames & hudson's well-known WORLD OF ART series: it was published in June 2004. She was a consultant and catalogue author for the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She has also written for publications including frieze, artforum, timeout and bomb.
Discussions (824) Opportunities (20) Events (0) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Fwd: <nettime> The Fela Project


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>
> Date: Sat Jul 12, 2003 1:08:25 AM US/Eastern
> To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
> Subject: <nettime> The Fela Project
> Reply-To: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>
>
> This is a remix of an essay and art piece written/created for the show
> based on
> Fela Anikalupo-Kuti called "Black President - the Legacy of Fela
> Kuti." I took
> several records of Tony Allen - who was Fela's drummer and often
> collaborative
> song-arranger, and did a remix based on an architectural manifesto for
> a new
> Kalakuta Republic - the physical aspects are posters created as street
> advertisements, and the actual sounds of the project were taken from
> various
> samples of Tony Allen's classic records of "Afrobeat" music over the
> last 30
> years - drum solos, horn riffs etc etc all an architecture of sound
> and rhythm.
>
>
> Manifesto for "A Different Utopia: Project for a New Kalakuta Republic
> 2003"
>
> can be found at:
> http://www.djspooky.com/differentutopia.html
>
>
>
> A Different Utopia
> Project for a New Kalakuta Republic 2003
> By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
>
>
> In a world of constant upheaval and continuous transformation,
> sometimes we
> look to music as a way of escaping the problems of the world. Fela did
> the
> opposite: his music was about immersion in the ebb and flow of the
> conflicts
> that described and circumscribed the nation state he inhabited. His
> home was
> Nigeria, a place of so many contradictions and fictions that it might
> as well
> exist as a story, a fable spun from the fevered imagination of a very
> strange
> storyteller. The name "Nigeria" itself is an inheritance from a
> colonial past
> bequeathed to the confused and angry people who found themselves
> confined and
> defined within its borders after the colonial powers decided what
> would be the
> best route to economic balance between Europe and Africa. As a
> country, Nigeria
> and most of the Sub-Saharan continent were created on maps drawn on a
> palindrome of political and economic expedience - all of which did not
> involve
> those who were most relevant to the process: the people who actually
> lived
> there.
>
> "The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is
> completely
> fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
> The
> Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape,
> unless it
> offers that too... Through this pervasiveness, its existence has
> become like
> the Nature it has replaced: taken for granted, almost invisible,
> certainly
> indescribeable..." Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
>
> In the world of post-colonial Africa, what Fela did was foster a unique
> circumstance - he created a utopia. His "Kalakuta Republic" was a way
> of
> producing a space that reflected his desires as an African to build an
> independent cultural zone, a place that literally, following the
> definition of
> the term "utopia" didn't exist. The "Kalakuta Republic" was
> essentially a space
> that reflected his values and needs - something all too rare in the
> post World
> War II African political and cultural landscape. It was an artificial
> place in
> the midst of an artificial situation what could be a better metaphor
> for
> contemporary Africa? Place one mirage in front of another and you get
> a hall of
> mirrors, a place where reality comes only by design, and that's a good
> starting
> point to look at the "Kalakuta Republic" By creating a social space
> bounded by
> and founded on African needs, he had to secede from the imaginary
> space of mass
> culture that was called "Nigeria" to create a new story, a new fiction
> founded
> on music, and culture indigenous to the people who lived there.
> Fictional
> spaces and imaginary cities - new forms demand new functions - that's
> what Fela
> told us with his Shrine Project. The logic of the "Kalakuta Republic"
> flows
> from a twisted cross-roads of modernity on the edge of the
> post-modern: where
> other young countries like Brazil would bring in someone like Oscar
> Niemeyer to
> construct a new capital like Brasilia, or Le Corbusier, at Chandigarh,
> India,
> in the 1950's or the United States with Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 design
> of
> Washington D.C., Nigeria, with Fela, was pressed by so many demands in
> so many
> different directions that his new city had to improvise on the spot in
> response
> to a scenario where, to say the least, the people running the
> government didn't
> want a new more dynamic architecture to represent their "new" nation
> state.
> Unlike the European notion of "Utopia" as a planned and designed
> place of
> Reason and Rationality bequeathed from Thomas Moore, Plato, and
> Francis Bacon.
> Fela's "republic" would be made invi al city blocks. The city Fela
> found
> himself in was a "found-object" to be manipulated and remixed at will,
> and
> essentially, that's what provides the foundation for my investigation
> into his
> concepts of architecture.
>
> The "A Different Utopia" project imagines a remix of the architecture
> of Fela's
> "Kalakuta Republic" along lines imagined by proportion and ratio - it
> poses two
> different cultures in conflict, and like a dj, it asks them to
> understand the
> rhythms of the different cultures that inspired the structures that
> Fela
> engaged. Thesis, Anti-thesis - Synthesis. "A Different Utopia" is a
> dialectical
> triangulation between the forces of modernity and it's fixed forms,
> and the
> fluid dynamic needs of a critique of post-colonial reason and
> rationality. The
> original "Kalakuta Republic" attempted to secede from Nigeria several
> times,
> and in this day and age when artists like C.M. Von Hausswolf
> arbitrarily create
> nation states with their own passports, and artists collectives
> routinely
> create collective fictions of nation-states, like , well, all I can
> say is that
> art-history has caught up to people like Fela. The philosopher
> Santayana said
> in his 1905, "The Life Of Reason" collection of essays and
> observations: "Those
> who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." A "Different
> Utopia"
> is meant to highlight the linkages between the urge to create your own
> space
> and the world context of living in a highly regulated contemporary
> information
> culture. What happens when you can access different versions of the
> past, and
> sample them? What happens when the culture you live in is dispersed
> throughout
> the globe and you are left to play with the fragments? That's what
> this project
> is about. Diaspora and convergence, reality in the 21st century as a
> nomadic
> flux based on the dynamic interaction of many cultures in the same
> space -
> living, working, and breathing at the same time. Different kinds of
> reason
> imply different modes of thinking about how to exist in an environment
> that
> denies you any and all aspects of "subjectivity." After all ‚ that's
> what
> nation states are about: there are subjects, and there are rulers.
> What I
> propose in "Different Utopia" is a landscape based on Plato's
> "Republic" the
> text is remixed and reconfigure eems, and we're left to our own
> devices to actually engage the songs of freedom that Fela made room
> for in a
> post , and now , neo-colonial world
>
>
> utopia U*to"pi*a, n. [NL., fr. Gr. not + ? a place.] 1. An imaginary
> island,
> represented by Sir Thomas More, in a work called Utopia, as enjoying
> the
> greatest perfection in politics, laws, and the like. See Utopia, in the
> Dictionary of Noted Names in Fiction. 2. Hence, any place or state of
> ideal
> perfection. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1996,
> 1998
> MICRA, Inc.
>
> It was in 1985 that Fela created his "Kalakuta Republic" in which he
> essentially christened an autonomous zone where the rule of law in
> Nigeria was
> left at it borders. In essence, what he did was take his idea of a
> nightclub
> and turn it upside down and inside out - there was no invocation of
> pleasure in
> his declaration of independence. As always, Fela was a trickster, and
> even in
> the case of attempting to set up a new country that comprised only
> several city
> blocks, he thought of creating a new relationship between himself,
> language and
> the way he lived in a world governed by rules he felt did not apply to
> him. He
> needed a term to describe the thought process of living in a
> post-colonial
> mentality, and that's what the Shrine and the Republic were about: "It
> was when
> I was in a police cell at the C.I.D. (Central Intelligence Division)
> headquarters in Lagos; the cell I was in was named "The Kalakuta
> Republic" by
> the prisoners. I found out when I went to East Africa that "Kalakuta"
> is a
> Swahili word that means "rascal." So, if rascality is going to get us
> what we
> want, we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we
> have to be
> rascally with them."
>
> In Platos "Republic" all aspects of living in the Utopian City are
> governed by
> rules of proportion and ratio (ratio, of course, being the root word of
> "rationality" and the psychological impact of the arts, and
> contemplation of
> forms that are both visible and intelligible - it's the same myth that
> drove
> the making of the film "The Matrix" but its a story that was told
> several
> thousand years ago: shadow and act, phantom and fiction ‚Ai the
> future
> "Republic" in Plato's story would be governed by people who had seen
> past the shadows of an illusion and tried to bring light to people
> whose
> imaginations had been chained. Fela publicized in some of the flyers
> for the
> "New Afrika Shrine" Republic something similar to the "Republic" that
> Plato had
> said so long ago in his "myth of the cave" (Book VII) of the
> "Republic" "When
> ruling becomes a thing fought over, such a war - a domestic war, one
> within the
> family - destroys these men themselves and the rest of the family.
> pp199
>
> It's this kind of internecine conflict that led to the destruction of
> Fela's
> compound, and in a way, the digital reconstruction of it that takes
> place in my
> project is a blue-print for a different rhythm, a different ratio - a
> different
> drummer. The "Kalakuta Republic" I imagine is one of pan-humanism
> based on a
> universal architecture of networks and correspondences, it is an
> environment
> based transactions placed in a web of coded languages and vernacular
> systems.
> In our information based economy, we inhabit a world where the
> structures we
> inhabit reflect our desires in so many ways - they are flexible,
> modular, and
> above all else - transitory. Goethe and Schelling said so long ago
> "architecture is nothing but frozen music." "A Different Utopia"
> inverts the
> question and asks: what happens when you dethaw the process? It's a
> project
> based on Tony Allen's 1979 record "No Accommodation for Lagos" and
> incorporates
> the afro-rhythms he used for that project to create a map/blueprint of
> an
> "imaginary city" based on the proportions of beats and pulses that the
> artist
> Ghariokwu Osunlila (who designed many of the covers for Fela and Tony
> Allen's
> Afrika 70 collaborations) would imagine - a cartoon universe where
> sounds of an
> imaginary landscape built of ratio and proportion defined the record
> cover
> sleeves to reflect the same concerns George Clinton and Pedro Mayer
> (the artist
> who designed many of the Funkadelic record cover sleeves) an
> Afro-Futurist
> landscape of sonic fiction made to be more real than the "real" that
> the
> musicians invoked with their sounds. As Fela wrote in an advertisement
> in the
> magazine "Punch" in 1979, the Shrine was meant to be a place of new
> values:
> "After a long battle with the authority, we are staging a big comeback
> at the
> new Afrika Shrine... We want the authority, the news media, the public
> and
> everybody concerned to know that Afrika Shrine is NOT A NIGHTCLUB -
> it is a
> place where we can worship the gods of our ancestors."
>
> He went on to blur the lines between Church and Shrine with a 7 point
> description:
>
> a) The Church is an ideological centre for the spreading of European
> and
> American cultural and political awareness
> The Shrine is an ideological centre for the spreading of Afrikan
> cultural and
> political awareness.
>
> b) The Church is a place where songs are rendered for worship. The
> Shrine is a
> place where songs are rendered for worship.
>
> c) The Church is a place where they collect money. The Shrine is a
> place where
> we collect money.d) The Church is a place where they drink while
> worshipping
> ("holy communion"). The Shrine is a place where we drink
> while worshipping.
>
> e) The Church is a place where they smoke during worship (burning of
> incense).
> The Shrine is a place where we smoke during worship.
>
> f) The Church is a place where they dress the way they like for
> worship. The
> Shrine is a place where we dress the way we like for worship.
>
> g) The Church is a place where they practice foreign religion. The
> Shrine is a
> place where we practice Afrikan religion.
>
> Another quotation: "And finally, in the very last episode, the Tower
> of Babel
> suddenly appears and some strongmen actually finish it under a new
> song of
> hope, and as they complete the top, the Ruler (of the Olympus,
> probably) runs
> off making a fool of himself while Mankind, suddenly understanding
> everything,
> finally takes its rightful place and right away begins its new life
> with new
> insights into everything..." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
>
> In the here and now, "A Different Utopia" is a bridge between
> the visions of reason that held together Europe and Africa, the U.S.
> and
> Nigeria ‚Ai and proposes a philosophy of rhythm. The text becomes
> shareware. The beats and pulses, bass-lines and sounds, they are
> threads of a
> sonic tapestry woven out of desire and dreams. They are vanishing
> points on the
> landscape of the imagination - that's to say that they're points
> alright, but
> they punctuate a different architectural syntax, a place that Rem
> Koolhas would
> call the "culture of congestion" or that Tony Allen would simply call
> "No
> Accommodation." Here, the soundlines and vectors of an invisible social
> sculpture become indexical - they're signifiers of meaning at the edge
> of
> understanding. Ratio and rationality, rhyme and reason ‚ these get
> remixed
> again and again. In a "Different Utopia" the Santayana phrase becomes
> a new
> axiom: those who do not understand history remix it to create their
> own.
>
>
> =======================================================================
> =====
> "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they
> are
> free...." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
>
>
> Port:status>OPEN
> wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com
>
> Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
>
> Office Mailing Address:
>
> Subliminal Kid Inc.
> 101 W. 23rd St. #2463
> New York, NY 10011
>
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
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> # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg
> body
> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
>

DISCUSSION

Fwd: etoy.JOBS: german to english translator needed


Begin forwarded message:

> From: jobs@etoy.com
> Date: Fri Jul 25, 2003 4:36:48 PM US/Eastern
> Subject: etoy.JOBS: german to english translator needed
>
> etoy.JOBS: NEW POSITION AVAILABLE
> *****************************************************
>
> etoy.JOBS, a workforce for cultural operations,
> is urgently looking for an experienced german
> to english translator capable of translating 3
> A4 pages of text in close contact with etoy.CREW.
>
> responsibilities: accurate translation of german
> etoy.TEXT into english. deadline compatible.
> ability to cope with etoy.LIFESTYLE.
>
> time commitment: project based.
>
> payment: $400 in registered etoy.SHARES (SYMBOL: EYA).
> etoy.SHARES can be transfered into existing portfolio
> or an etoy.BANKER will set up a new etoy.SHAREHOLDER.
>
> contact etoy.JOBS: jobs@etoy.com / subj: TRANSLATION
>
> etoy.JOBS: POSITIONS STILL AVAILABLE
> ****************************************************
>
> etoy.POSITIONS still open in the following areas:
> sales & marketing, secretarial, accounting & coders.
>
> for more detailed job descriptions please visit:
>
> jobs: <http://www.etoy.com/job.html>
> lifestyle: <http://feed.etoy.com/archives/000048.html>
>
> SIGNED,
> etoy.ZAK on behalf of etoy.JOBS
>
> CONTACT: jobs@etoy.com
> USA: 1.800.810.ETOY x 7 (TOLL FREE)
> SWITZERLAND: +41 (0) 848 0000 24
>

DISCUSSION

Fwd: BDP 2004 (25/07/03)


Begin forwarded message:

> From: infos@biennaledeparis.org
> Date: Fri Jul 25, 2003 12:19:31 PM US/Eastern
> To: rachel@rhizome.org
> Subject: BDP 2004 (25/07/03)
>
> BDP 2004 (25/07/03)
>
> Ceci n'est pas une annonce publicitaire ni commerciale,
> pour ne plus recevoir les informations de la BDP desinscivez vous en
> cliquant sur

DISCUSSION

Fwd: Hysterics - On Line Art Magazine 6/2003 (23)


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "BGSW" <bgsw@poczta.onet.pl>
> Date: Fri Jul 25, 2003 12:08:27 PM US/Eastern
> To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
> Subject: Hysterics - On Line Art Magazine 6/2003 (23)
>
> Zapraszamy do przeczytania Hysterics - On Line Art Magazine 6/2003
> (23):
> http://www.hysterics.art.pl
>
> We hope you enjoyed receiving our Hysterics - On Line Art Magazine
> 6/2003
> (23):
> http://www.hysterics.art.pl
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.baltic-gallery.art.pl/
>

DISCUSSION

Fwd: Digital Day Camp - Exhibition and Opening Reception


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Begin forwarded message:

> From: info@eyebeam.org
> Date: Thu Jul 24, 2003 6:51:59 PM US/Eastern
> To: <list@eyebeam.org>
> Subject: Digital Day Camp - Exhibition and Opening Reception
>

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<excerpt><bold>From: </bold>info@eyebeam.org

<bold>Date: </bold>Thu Jul 24, 2003 6:51:59 PM US/Eastern

<bold>To: </bold><<list@eyebeam.org>

<bold>Subject: </bold>Digital Day Camp - Exhibition and Opening
Reception

</excerpt>
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CURATED EXHIBITIONS (1)