MeTube: August sings Carmen 'Habanera'
"'MeTube', a homage to thousands of ambitious YouTube users and video bloggers, gifted and less gifted self-promoters on the Internet, has attracted international attention. No less than George Bizet’s Habanera from 'Carmen' has been reinterpreted for MeTube and enhanced with electronic sounds. Behind the cross-over of musical styles are director Daniel Moshel as well as opera and oratorio tenor August Schram."
(Moshel Film & August Schram, 2013)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Student experiences of disability social networks, in and around higher education
"For many young people social networks such as Facebook are an essential part of their student experience. Other web-based, interactive services like Wikipedia and YouTube are also an important facet of everyday student life. New technologies have always been scrutinized for their capacity to support education and, as social technologies become more pervasive, universities are under increasing pressure to appropriate them for teaching and learning. However, the educational impact of applying these Web 2.0 technologies is uncertain.
Using a Foucauldian perspective, my qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Interviews incorporate the internet to expand opportunities for discussion, observation and analysis. Mobile broadband, a remote desktop viewer and screen capture have been flexibly applied together to ensure an accessible interview situation and recognise students' preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory.
Disabled students' networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment.
Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time.
As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports 'normal' status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination.
Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network."
(Sarah Lewthwaite, Slewth Press)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pink Flamingos: a provocative celebration of otherness
"'Pink Flamingos was an antihippie movie made for hippies who would be punks in two years. It's a pothead movie. I wrote it on pot.' - John Waters"
(Jeff Jackson, DreamlandNews)
Fig.1 John Waters (1972). trailer for "Pink Flamingos".
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Les Enfants Terribles: Illustrator Robert Williams
"This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America's most opprobrious and maligned underground artists, the painter, Robert Williams. It was this artist to brought the term 'lowbrow' into the fine arts lexicon, with his ground breaking book of 1979, The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams. It was from this point, that the seminal elements of West Coast Outlaw culture slowly started to aggregate."
(Robert Williams)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Klaxons' 'Twin Flames' Orgy Mutates Flesh, Fantasy
"Art-pop band Klaxons' new video for 'Twin Flames' is a subversive CGI orgy of mutant sex and FX. The promo reel for the latest single from Surfing the Void shows band members and multiracial schoolgirls morphing into one another in an ecstatic phantasmagoria that might be the opposite of sexy, depending on which side of the sensual divide you reside."
(Scott Thill, 19 November 2010, Wired Magazine)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
