The art of law (and the law of art) is perpetual crisis

In this performance-based work, which essentially concerns the fable of ‘Khi + Ordo’, we obliquely—through visual-textual storytelling—focus on what we call ‘the agency of the artist-scholar’, deconstructing, inter alia, many of the rules and regulations associated with the art-academic industrial complex—i.e., the institutional dictates to produce commodifiable works, the enforced metrics associated with authorised forms of research and publication, and the often-inelegant and mostly unnecessary dance that the artist-scholar performs with ‘all of that’. The photo-essay is developed from the archive of the Out of India Collective (OOI), but in association with the Metropolitan Transmedia Authority (MTA), its successor collective. It draws upon documents associated with OOI experiments in transmedia undertaken across multiple submissions for residencies, exhibitions, and publications in both academia and the art world in the years 2017–2019, even as it focuses upon the fable of ‘Khi + Ordo’. ‘Ordo’ is a synonym (or metaphor) for totalitarian states and regimes—‘regimes’ being, in this case, those that rule art + law. ‘Law’ here infers, through its negation, the appearance of a higher law, one that is entered upon when one resists assimilation to the rules and regulations associated with police states—incipient or otherwise. We call that other law ‘works-based agency’, and the artist-scholar is beholden to it once s/he departs company with all such quotidian systems of abject hegemony. One crisis leads to another, so to speak, on multiple levels and all at once.

     

Acquisition‐Hungry Premier Swallows RHM*

Premier Foods was successful in becoming the UK's largest grocery supplier in early 2007 after the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the UK competition authority, approved its £1.2 billion purchase of RHM. The merger means that iconic brands often found in British kitchens, such as Hovis breads, Lyons cakes, Bird's custard, Branston pickle, and dozens of other well‐known products, will now be manufactured by the same food group.

Gavin Murphy examines the OFT's merger assessment.     

Implementing eGovernment without promoting dependence: open source software in developing countries in Southeast Asia

Given that eGovernment is likely to become part of development strategies, the most desirable form of eGovernment is that which promotes the domestic generation of intellectual property or, at least, contributes least to the international intellectual property (IP) imbalance. One way to achieve these ends is to implement eGovernment using free or open source software (FOSS). This will reduce dependence on software owned by major companies in developed countries. It could also promote an IP generating capacity in developing countries. An examination of the status of free or open source software in developing countries in Southeast Asia reveals that governments in these countries are aware of FOSS and wish to foster its use (but face considerable pressure to use proprietary software). This examination also reveals the presence of small but active groups seeking to develop and promote the use of free or open source software. This article is comprised of a discussion of FOSS (including that suitable for eGovernment), an explanation of the importance of FOSS for developing countries, a justification of government's centrality to the introduction of FOSS and a consideration of policies and initiatives undertaken by governments in developing countries in Southeast Asia. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Terror in Japan

Observers of early twenty-first-century Japan commonly note economic, political, and social crisis, on the one hand, and pessimism, lethargy, or helplessness about the possibility of reform, on the other. Yet Japan's civil society was idealistic and energetic in the early postwar decades. What happened? The reform movement that captured much of the vitality of the early postwar decades was either foreclosed, as many were co-opted in the “all-for-growth” economism, consumerism, and the corporation, or crushed in successive waves of repression of dissidence as the cold war order took shape. Political parties sacrificed broad vision and ideals to narrow-interest articulation. While the mass base of the reform movement was discouraged, demoralized, and depoliticized, one minority in the late 1960s turned to violent revolution and another in the late 1980s turned inward to seek spiritual satisfaction. Both paths led to violence. This article looks at the course of the student movement between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, with particular reference to the Japan Red Army, and at the new religious movement Aum Supreme Truth in the 1980s and 1990s. Both adopted “terrorist” tactics, by almost any understanding of that term. However, they were children of their times, reflecting the same deep social, political, and moral problems that Japan as a whole continues to face in the early twenty-first century.