SIVACRACY.NET: The 2006 Whitney Biennial

There is a lot of great buzz about the 2006 Whitney Bienniel, which opened this week.

I am thrilled that work by Austin's eccentric genius Daniel Johnston was included in this exhibit.

This is from a review of the show from the Village Voice:

"Day for Night" is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen. In some ways it isn't a biennial at all. Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne have rebranded the biennial, presenting a thesis, not a snapshot, a proposition about art in a time when modernism is history and postmodernist rhetoric feels played out. This show, and the art world, are trying to do what America can't or won't do: Use its power wisely, innovatively, and with attitude; be engaged and, above all, not define being a citizen of the world narrowly.

I am proud to report that the curators of the show asked me to contirbute an essay called "The Technocultural Imagination" (which you can read here) to the catalog.

Appearing onThe Daily Show was pretty fun. But I think this is a coolest thing my work has ever been a part of.

The 2006 Whitney Biennial Catalogue

The 2006 Whitney Biennial catalogue, with 800 pages and more than 200 images, will use an innovative book format in order to present a remarkable artists’ section, "Draw Me a Sheep." Borrowing its title from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, the section will be a collection of individual artist pages done as a series of four-panel “poster” foldouts.

By inviting each artist to create a page for the book, "Draw Me a Sheep" presents an image from the artist's world and explores how each artist deals with representation in his or her own time. In addition to the artists’ section, the catalogue will contain a general introduction and a conversation between the curators, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne and the art historian Toni Burlap; a foreword by Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg; and contributions by critic and teacher Johanna Burton; Bradley Eros, an artist, experimental filmmaker, curator, writer, performer, and researcher, whose work was shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial; Lia Gangitano, founder and director of Participant Inc. and former curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Thread Waxing Space, New York; Bruce Hainley, a contributing editor of Artforum and Associate Director of Graduate Studies in Criticism & Theory at Art Center College of Design; Molly Nesbit, a professor of Art at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum; cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan; and writer and cultural commentator Neville Wakefield. In addition the book will include excerpts from a series of articles by the writer and noted French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (the complete series will be published by Random House in January 2006).

The book is designed by Conny Purtill, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. The retail price is $50 and the publication date is March 2006. It is available at the Whitney Museum Store.

biennial.8.jpg

If you are in or around New York before June 1, you should definitely pop into the Whitney to see the exhibit.

biennial.5.jpg

Comments

Like the written piece very much. Takes me back to the days when my grandparents had only two or three precious books in their possession; and forward to my children who have hundreds of sacred tomes.
Looking forward to a guided tour of the Whitney exhibit before June 1.

Posted by: Vanaja | March 2, 2006 08:14 PM

Love the art and the writing. More to see and read yet.

Are the broken walls the curators’ stage setting or an artist’s work? It is very powerful.

Day for Night
Is that enlightenment, hopefulness or a hopeful illusion?
Now for Future.

What do those rocks say?

It’s the sheep idea that is getting to me the most….
In some ways, I can see the peace of sheep…
But, I can fear the lost feeble complaint.…
that
Did we not howl soon enough
To save ourselves…

WE have to prove our democracy to get people who support science to reverse global warming, hopfully still possible...

* * * * *

Dear New Yorkers,

Your lever voting machines
are as non-evidentiary
as e-voting machines.

Do you use central tabulators?

Then you need to howl...

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2006/1294

What are e-voting machines and central tabulators that pass the voting results over electronic networks from the internet to phone lines? No more than data easily spied on and tapped into. The Franklin County Board of Elections, for example, tells us that it was a transmission error in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people cast votes and Bush, the Wonder Boy, received 4258 votes. It’s not magic, nor is it an accident or an act of God. If the vote total wasn’t so hugely illogical, no one would have caught it.

Congress must investigate whether Bush used the NSA for partisan political gain during the 2004 election, and whether any NSA Bush operatives or other members of the security industrial complex had access to e-voting machines, central tabulators or the communication lines that delivered the voting results.

.......................

For much more information see:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

To see how people in different states are fighting this:

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/19494.html

While Florida vindicates Ion Sancho, Jeb Bush threatens Sancho's job

Bev Harris
Posted on Friday, March 03, 2006 - 08:33 pm:

"You could steal the election and no one would ever know," Leon County (FL) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho says.

Sancho arranged for an independent study by Black Box Voting with security experts Harri Hursti and Dr. Herbert Thompson, discovering critical security flaws in the Diebold voting system. These flaws were confirmed in a study ordered by the California Secretary of state. Today the state of Florida issued a Technical Advisory to all Supervisors of Elections based on these findings.

And today, Sancho received a letter from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sec. State Sue Cobb, threatening action by the state of Florida to take over Leon County elections.
(Link: Letter from Jeb Bush/Sue Cobb to Sancho)

Ion Sancho is one of the most highly respected elections officials in the nation. He stood up to the state of Florida, refusing to cooperate with purging voters who are not felons from the voters list, working from lists provided by the state of Florida erroneously claiming they were felons.

It is Sancho who was chosen to lead the Florida hand count in the contentious 2000 Bush v. Gore race. The U.S. Supreme Court nixed the hand count.
Scarcely begun, recounts halted in 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling

And it is Sancho who has provided the most convincing evidence of the utter failure of both the federal testing labs and Florida's state voting machine testing. Neither the federal labs caught the defects which are referred to in the Hursti Report as "the mother of all security holes" and "an unlockable revolving door."

Diebold knew

After the findings in Leon County were published in May 2005, Diebold responded by attacking and smearing the messenger (Ion Sancho), denying the problem instead of fixing the system.

Diebold letters to officials

Instead of warning other elections officials so they could improve security by taking countermeasures, Diebold sent hundreds of letters to elections officials throughout the U.S. smearing Sancho for being "irresponsible" and denying that the flaws exist.

Diebold's denials didn't work in Pennsylvania. The state of Pennsylvania, after independent testing by Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Michael Shamos, refused to certify the system.

Pennsylvania declines some Diebold...

The state of California commissioned its own independent study (Berkeley Report), which confirmed the results from Leon County:

quote:

"Harri Hursti's attack does work: Mr. Hursti's attack on the AV-OS is definitely real. He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card. He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system, including the GEMS election management server."

...

"Memory card attacks are a real threat: We determined that anyone who has access to a memory card of the AV-OS, and can tamper it (i.e. modify its contents), and can have the modified cards used in a voting machine during election, can indeed modify the election results from that machine in a number of ways. The fact that the the results are incorrect cannot be detected except by a recount of the original paper ballots."

"Successful attacks can only be detected by examining the paper ballots: There would be no way to know that any of these attacks occurred; the canvass procedure would not detect any anomalies, and would just produce incorrect results. The only way to detect and correct the problem would be by recount of the original paper ballots, e.g. during the 1 percent manual recount."

Diebold issued written statements to the Arizona Secretary of State and to elections officials throughout America claiming that passwords were needed, and also that the vulnerabilities did not exist.

Meanwhile, Ion Sancho has been blackballed by the vendors....

The state of Florida knew

In July 2005, Black Box Voting sent a certified copy of the Hursti Report to then-Florida secretary of state Glenda Hood and to then-Florida voting system chief, Paul Craft. In addition, Paul Craft received a letter from world-renowned M.I.T. security expert Ronald Rivest warning that the Hursti findings were a serious concern.

Yet the state of Florida did no additional study or testing. Glenda Hood and Paul Craft resigned suddenly in November 2005, with Sue Cobb and David Drury taking over -- but no studies of the critical security flaw identified in Leon County were ordered by either the former or the current secretary of state, nor were any studies done by either voting system examiner.

The problem was first reported by Black Box Voting in May 2005, with formal reports going out by certified mail in July 2005. After no action by Florida officials, a full fledged demonstration of hacking the election in Leon County took place on Dec. 13, 2005

At this time, Gov. Jeb Bush promised to look into the problem, but commissioned no studies and did nothing to decertify the system after its flaws were confirmed in other states.

Volunteers ready and willing to hand count Leon County; Florida says it's against the law

When news of Leon County's blackballing spread across the nation, volunteers from as far away as New Hampshire and Texas began plans to step in and hand-count the next two Leon County elections.

Jeb Bush isn't having any part of that: No hand counts can take place in Florida. It's the law.

The state of Florida has not only continued to demand that officials purchase unauditable paperless touch-screens, but actually accelerated the schedule. Whereas most states require HAVA-compliant systems by the first federal election in 2006, Florida moved the compliance date up to January 2006.

Florida has declined to certify the AutoMark, a device that enables election supervisors to comply with a Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandate for the disabled, forcing county officials to use only paperless touch-screen machines for disabled voters.
...

According to the Associated Press, Sancho plans to fight!

"We will be talking to our lawyers over the weekend," Sancho said. "Somebody is going to pay for it."

State orders security safeguards for voting machines

PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED, MUST INCLUDE LINK TO http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Posted by: Many Blue, Yellow and Green Dogs | March 5, 2006 04:52 PM

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)