Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terrorist.

Following the words of Giorgio Agamben (from his 2001 article “On Security and Terror”), security has become the basic principle of international politics after 9/11, and the “sole criterion of political legitimation.” But security – reducing plural, spontaneous and surprising phenomena to a level of calculability – also seems to operate against a political legitimacy based on possibilities of dissent, and stands in clear opposition to artistic creativity. Being uncalculable by nature, art is often incompatible with the demands of security and consequently viewed as a “risk,” leading to the arrest of artists, and a neutralization of innovative environments for the sake of security.

Yet precisely the position of art outside the calculable seems to bring about a new politicization of art, and some speak of art as “politics by other means.” Has art become the last remaining enclave of a critique of violence? Yet how “risky” can art be?

The contributors to DATA browser 04: CREATING INSECURITY address these questions at the intersection of art, technology, and politics.

Contributors from Giorgio Agamben, Konrad Becker, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer, glorious ninth, Brian Holmes, carlos katastrofsky, Martin Knahl, Norbert Koppensteiner, Daniela Ingruber, The Institute for Applied Autonomy, Naeem Mohaiemen, Mukul Patel, Luis Silva, Wolfgang Sützl, Tiziana Terranova, and McKenzie Wark.

A feature-length cinematic portrait of this larger-than-life iconic figure, fluidly fusing meditative and experimental imagery, autobiographical anecdotes, family home movies, and literary excerpts to produce a stylized and highly unusual documentary. The film's nonlinear structure follows Delany's own use of autobiography, science-fiction, social criticism, pornography and semiotics. Also features an appearance by novelist Jonathan Lethem. The bonus disc contains 2 and 1/2 hours of never-before-seen Delany interviews and includes the full version of his own film, The Orchid. 2 DVD set, 80+150 min. 2009

An oversized, full-color, hardbound retrospective volume surveying the visual and “fusion” art of Shalom Neuman, with accompanying texts by Enrico Baj, Donald Kuspit and Robert Morgan, an interview with Neuman conducted by Tsaurah Litzky, and photos by James Dee, Deborah Fries and Francis James.

All power to the imagination? Over the past forty years to invoke the imagination as a basis for radical politics has become a cliché: a rhetorical utilization of ideas already in circulation, invoking the mythic unfolding of this self-institutionalizing process. But what exactly is radical imagination? Drawing from autonomist politics, class composition analysis, and avant-garde arts, Imaginal Machines explores the emergence, functioning, and constant breakdown of the embodied forms of radical imagination.

What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it seems that the imagination has already seized power through the power of the spectacle? Does any subversive potentiality remain? Perhaps it is only honest to think in terms of a temporally-bounded subversive power. It might be that imaginal machines only work by breaking down. That is, their functioning is only possible, paradoxically, by their malfunctioning. By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back into the working of capital and the state, we create possibilities for a politics continually reconstituted against and through the dynamics of recuperation: to keep open an antagonism without closure.

An infinite series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our life, of our loves, but also the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order. At any given moment different paths open up in front of us, and we are continually presented with the alternative of going here or going there. Then we decide, we cut out from a set of infinite possibilities and choose a single path. But do we really choose? Is it really a question of a choice, when we go here rather than there? Is it really a choice, when masses go to shopping centers, when revolutions are transformed into massacres, when nations enter into war? It is not we who decide but the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desires and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. The fundamental bifurcation is always this one: between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. In our time of digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the social psyche.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a contemporary writer, media-theorist and media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). He is author of numerous books, including Cyberpunk, The Panther and the Rhizome, Politics of Mutation, Philosophy and Politics in the Twilight of Modernity, and The Factory of Unhappiness. He is currently collaborating on the magazine Derive Approdi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan.

Modern science postulates that our political predispositions can be traced to our genes. To some extent, there is such a thing as “red-state” or “blue-state” DNA.

Our brains likewise bear the evolutionary imprint of hundreds of thousands of years of political wiring — for biased partisanship. The result is a political landscape characterized by irrationality and hostility.

Americans today, like citizens of many other countries, find themselves trapped in hostile “red” vs. “blue” political warfare. While liberals and conservatives fight each other for power and influence, the world’s problems go unsolved.

Using recent scientific evidence from neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary and cognitive psychology, Red Genes, Blue Genes is the first book to take a comprehensive look at the phenomenon of political irrationality.

This book seeks to unravel a number of political mysteries:

➤ Why does it seem that liberals and conservatives are different kinds of people?

➤ Why are political arguments so hostile and impervious to reason?

➤ Why are partisans and political figures so certain they are right all the time?

➤ Why are citizens everywhere unsatisfied with “democratic” systems of government?

➤ Why are political campaigns so shallow, vicious and manipulative?

This book provides answers to the above questions, showing how understanding political irrationality may enable us to devise new systems of government that are truly democratic.

“American politics is irrational, but Guillermo Jiménez explains why this is the case so rationally and sensibly that this country would be in a far better place if everyone read this very well-written book — and better yet, examined and reconsidered their voting patterns because of it.” — Gene Stone, author of The Bush Survival Bible

"Guillermo Jiménez brings an element to political analysis that is both rare and welcome: self-reflection. His theory of political irrationality is not likely to please hyper-partisans of either the left or the right. For that very reason, it strikes me as indispensable." — Mark Goldblatt, political columnist, author of Africa Speaks

Guillermo C. Jiménez is an assistant professor of international trade at the State University of New York (SUNY). A graduate of Harvard University and the University of California–Berkeley, he has lectured in over 35 countries and addressed various international organizations and bodies such as the United Nations and the European Commission. Red Genes, Blue Genes: Exposing Political Irrationality is his fourth book. He blogs at www.redgenesbluegenes.com.

Over 400 pages of the most searing, scandalous and scurrilous denunciations of fellow writers ever to appear in print! Innovative, free-form and traditional reviews of texts from the Bible and Ulysses to Borges, Calvino and David Sedaris by Luc Sante, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Jim Knipfel, Carl Watson, David Ulin, Sharon Mesmer, many more. Illustrated in color.

“The Unbearables bare all; they are unbearably smart, unbearably talented, and unbearably lively — but here are the Unbearables at their highly bearable best. It’s a pleasure to find out what this group finds unbearable in such an engaging manner.” — Samuel Delany, author of Dark Reflections."The Unbearables are a bunch of cranks, crackpots, malcontents, misanthropes,ass-pains and brain-aches. Bless their sour pusses.” — John Strausbaugh, author of Sissy Nation and Black Like You

“From stapling together issues of the National Poetry Magazine Of The Lower Eastside at CBGBs in the mid ‘80s, to the publication of the Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Help Yourself! and now The Worst Book I Ever Read anthologies, the Unbearables have doggedly held onto their collective ideal, punk irreverence, and endless store of creative energy. It’s like the Disneyfication of downtown New York never happened.” — Brandon Stosuy, editor of Up Is Up, But So Is Down

“The Unbearables ARE!” — Bob Holman, Monsignor of the Bowery Poetry Club and King of the Spoken Word.

"The Unbearables are a bunch of cranks, crackpots, malcontents, misanthropes, ass-pains and brain-aches. Bless their sour pusses.” — John Strausbaugh, author of Sissy Nation and Black Like You

“Is this ‘nuevo lingo’ or just the infuriating talent of the avant garde? Kauffman and Feast, among others, self-expertise their talents of the comic thrown off centrifuge. So hang onto the Handel bars. The values here are devious, deviant, and delicious.” — Barney Rosset, former publisher of Grove Press & Evergreen Review

A conceptual arsenal for unlocking the secrets of consensus reality and the hyper-management of everyday life.

Konrad Becker, based in Vienna, Austria, is an interdisciplinary communication researcher and practitioner. He has been active in electronic media as an artist, writer, composer as well as curator, producer and organizer. Director and co-founder of the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0, and of Public Netbase from 1994 to 2006, he started World-Information.Org and World-Information Institute, a cultural intelligence agency and runs "Global Security Alliance" a cultural peacekeeping agency.

"With his seventy-two keys, Konrad Becker aims to unlock the gates of strategic reality: its construction over centuries, its imposition through stealth and force, its dull and laborious maintenance, and its dissolution and destruction by those who can’t take it anymore." — Brian Holmes

"Having come to the end of the Strategic Reality Dictionary, readers will know there is a deep contradiction within the secular class of reality engineers and behavior managers. While they stake their power on a profound relation to the material and to the measurable, too many invisible forces (those not investigated by physicists) still seem to exist and must be controlled." — Critical Art Ensemble