The new series of talks, discussions and presentations brought to you by Datacide and next:now is going into its third round on January 4th, 2019.

As always at Vétomat, Wühlischstr. 42, 10245 Berlin

Doors open 7pm

8pm
Round table discussion: Subculture and Economy in the age of Gentrification, Spotify and Amazon. With Jan Herold (Yaya23), Dan Hekate (Hekate Soundsystem, Coven H Records), Christoph Fringeli (Datacide, Praxis Records).

9.30
Dan Moss: New Videos
Dasa Raimanova: Two Shorts

+ public discussion

Round Table
It was particularly with Punk, but also with Techno and its many mutations that small labels, independent shops and zines have historically played a decisive role in creating networks to bypass and counter the mainstream corporate world. These possibilities of autonomy have been undermined since the ruling class unleashed their mad dog, Jeff Bezos, onto the innocent populous. Cannibalism and same-day delivery overshadow our everyday existence, as does the dim green glow of hours upon hours of suggested playlists. Is there a back door out of this madness?

Join us for a discussion with long-time underground dwellers Jan Herold (Yaya23), Dan Hekate (Hekate Soundsystem, Coven H Records), and Christoph Fringeli (Datacide, Praxis Records).

Dan Moss
A director and screenwriter, his first foray into film was a 50-minute documentary for BBC2 in 1992, when he was 13. He has since written, directed and produced one feature film and seven short films, along with a variety of music videos and online content. He has shot in locations across the world, including India, Italy and Uganda. He will show a number of shorts.

Dasa Raimanova
Dasa Raimanova, originally from Slovakia, is a freelance filmmaker, currently on a six months work placement at Deutsche Welle (DW) in Berlin.
Her documentary work explores socio-political topics, generally focussing on the stories of strong women. Dasa released her feature debut POLYLAND in 2017. She will be showing two short films.

Illustration by Joke Lanz for Datacide 18 (coming soon)

The second in a new series of talk and discussion events hosted by Datacide and next:now at Vétomat Berlin.

Datacide presents
Talk, performance, discussion
With Joke Lanz and Christoph Fringeli

17-12-2018

At Vétomat, Wühlischstr. 42, 10245 Berlin

Doors open 7pm

8pm
Christoph Fringeli: The Situationist International as World Cultural Heritage? A critique of the historicisation of a revolutionary group.

9pm
Joke Lanz: Spoken Word Performance

+ public discussion.

JOKE LANZ (*1965 Basel)

Joke Lanz has worked as a garbageman, factory worker, sales assistant, caretaker, housekeeper, carpet dealer, chicken farmer, record shop owner, night watch, sauna assistant, roadie, secretary, cleaner, nude model, part-time single father, chocolate producer, bike messenger…
Just to name a few! [Read more →]

„Once upon a time, pop‘s metabolism buzzed with dynamic energy, creating the surging-in-to-the-future feel of periods like the psychedelic sixties, the post-punk seventies, the hip-hop eighties and the rave nineties. The 2000s felt different. (…) Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the ‚Re‘ Decade (…): revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments. Endless retrospection. (…)“

– Simon Reynolds – Retromania (2011)ⁱ

Atari emulators, electro-swing, Polaroid replicas, or Hieronimus Bosch’s triptychs in Virtual Reality: everything nostalgia related sells better than ever, and we’re not just talking about pop and mainstream. Every obscure fraction of a subculture had also its 15 minutes of …revival in the past 18 years.

An obsessive (therefore unhealthy) attention to the past is influencing all aspects of cultural production in these days. This is certainly a “Sign o’ the times”ⁱⁱ.

Times of “Liquid fear””ⁱⁱⁱ, that tangible feeling of anxiety that has only vague contours but is present everywhere. Dangers can strike anytime, everywhere: no matter what’s your job, tomorrow you can be fired, like those guys at Leeman Bros carrying their stuff out in cardboard boxes; you can be shot while you sip your cappuccino, in the name of god or the N.R.A.: or you can be killed by some multi resistant bacteria, and you have the same chance to get infected on a safari looking for the big 5 or in your local hospital having a proctology check up. To quote Bauman’s favorite metaphor:

“We’re walking on a mine field, we are aware that all is full of explosives, but we don’t know where there will be an explosion and when. There are no solid structures to rely on, nothing in which we can invest our hope and expectations.”^iv

Or, using the words of Comité Invisible:

“From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.”^v

In this context the past can be seen as a cozy and warm nest, a perfect world that we can control as it is shaped by our selective memory, a safe place. And so, as thinks are like that, instead of struggling to build up an uncertain future (to go for an Utopia), a very common choice is to aspire to return to a golden past, to go for a “Retrotopia”^vi. The spreading of this approach is another “Sign o’ the times”, but one with very scary implications. [Read more →]

We’re happy to announce the start of a new series of talk and discussion events hosted by Datacide and next:now at Vétomat Berlin.

The first event is hosted by next:now as part of their Strategies to Resample the Future series on Friday December 7. The second will be hosted by Datacide on Monday December 17.

This is a kindergarten they turn us into children and then tell us we must learn to fend for ourselves they diminish us and accuse us of lacking self-esteem they steal our dignity while offering admonitions of our failure to confront reality.
[Michael Moorcock, Mother London]

Adults gave girls a pile of nonsense supported by childlike logic, while at the same time they make our “lord and masters” swallow little balls of science until they choke. For both of us, a ridiculous education.
[Louise Michel, quoted by Anne Boyer]

Man hat uns nicht gefragt / als wir noch kein Gesicht / ob wir leben wollten / oder lieber nicht
(Nobody asked us / when we had no face yet / if we wanted to live / or would rather not)
[Friedrich Holländer, Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte, sung by Marlene Dietrich]

1. A plague on both your playpens

Down with childhood and adulthood: one anathema entails the other, as Shulamith Firestone explained patiently in her famous tract, although her title stops before the ‘and’.
The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hate is directed outwards, and ‘motherlove’ is born.¹

But why did Firestone fail to spell out from the start that kiddiehood’s demise would take grown-upness with it? Perhaps she thought her essay – or even her book! – might be read all the way to the end. For the sake of those who missed it the first times, then, let us repeat here: repudiation of childhood is not a matter of extending adulthood’s reputed privileges to children (or vice-versa). Each term presupposes and reproduces the other. Both live off the theatre of their pseudo-opposition. [Read more →]