Após 42 anos de carreira, composição e performance, o autor discute alguns conceitos específicos que permearam seu trabalho com percussão. Ele se baseia aqui em algumas propostas composicionais em ...particular para retratar contextos, conceitos e princípios em sua produção. Apresenta-se então um panorama inicial de suas peças, assim como informações de base e conceitos fundamentais que possibilitam compreender o panorama conceitual e artístico que as fundamentaram. Os elementos selecionados para a discussão e que abordam obras distintas são: a) timbre (contrapondo percussão múltipla e uso de um único instrumento), b) notação (oferecendo apenas dois exemplos distintos que permitem observar alguns dos principais conceitos sobre), c) questionamento da obra musical e do papel do próprio performer e d) fisicalidade e uso de outros sentidos nas obras musicais. O artigo possibilita então uma compreensão mais abrangente sobre a produção do autor, partindo-se do olhar, das experiências, experimentos e do relato do próprio compositor/performer/percussionista, evidenciando, em diferentes níveis, como tal produção traz questionamentos voltados para vários paradigmas artísticos e percussivos.
In the early 1980s, the East German Ministry for State Security systematically recruited Arab students as covert informers. Analysis of this historical case contributes to discussions about ...surveillance as a social practice and to an emerging critical literature about intelligence agencies as knowledge producers and agents of governance. Proceeding from a close reading of archives documenting the recruitment process, I argue that it produced, first, classic modern bureaucratic security mechanisms designed to govern populations and, second, highly specific sovereign interventions into the lives of single individuals. By focusing primarily on the agents of surveillance, rather than its objects, the article addresses an important gap in the surveillance literature.
In the context of comparative legal history, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is contrasted with the Study Commission for Working Through the History and the Consequences of the ...SED Dictatorship in Germany. In an extensive examination, central aspects of the commissions' mandates and their implementation are analyzed, thus providing a deeper understanding of the two truth commissions. Whilst the final reports of the commissions serve as a central source, personal interviews with experts in transitional justice and contemporary witnesses from South Africa are also included in the work.
For over 30 years, Lieutenant General Markus Wolff headed the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic. Today, there is neither that state nor ...that service, and Wolf died in 2006. However, Wolff is certainly the most impressive figure in the intelligence world, above all in the period from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, and with his ability and results he established himself as the most capable Cold War head of the intelligence service. However, his fate is a tragic one, Wolff perished in the vortex of complex political-security relations between the East and the West, where the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were decisive for his personal and professional fate. The article analyzes and sheds light on the causes and impacts of complex social phenomena that trace broader social relations, with an emphasis on how these relations can affect an individual who is in a responsible position. The life story of Marcus Wolff is not only a story about him, about two Germanys, about the Cold War, but also a story that has a much deeper background, it is a story about sacrifice, betrayal and suffering in intelligence world.
The broad contours of the personal computing industry can be traced via contradictory waves of consolidation and fragmentation. For example, the incorporation of diverse systems under the banner of ...Internet connectivity in the 1990s paradoxically resulted in a narrower range of platforms. This paper extends this framework backwards through the inverse case of the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. While the market was heavily splintered during its late 1970s and 1980s heyday, the CPU's ubiquity, including in Asian, Latin American, and European hardware following the MSX standard, shows how material and logistical histories of microprocessor standardization did not inevitably lead to interoperability. Nevertheless, hardware standards predate cross-platform PC software compatibility, and the Z80's transnational impact is especially visible in its unauthorized East German clone, the U880. Despite platform divergences, the Z80 represents an important illustration of globalizing computational infrastructure prior to the collapse of state socialism and the breakthroughs of the 1990s.
An increasing number of private companies in the Global North are selling acoustic intelligence software to local authorities for the detection of sound events in public space that signal potential ...or actual infringements on security. Such sound events include screams, gunshots, exploding firecrackers, sounding car alarms, and breaking glass. This paper aims to show how three such companies - based in the Netherlands, South Korea, and the United States - situate their offerings in relation to eavesdropping, earwitnessing, and the history of human hearing and technology. It attempts to contextualise their rhetoric within a broader techno-cultural history of acoustic detection, eavesdropping, police and intelligence work, including intelligence work implemented by infamous state security organisations such as the Stasi. In so doing, this essay both unravels what these companies exclude from their public presentation and clarifies how research into historical shifts in the cultural tropes of earwitnessing and eavesdropping can help elucidate how present-day acoustic intelligence software is constructed as socially acceptable.
The German Democratic Republic undertook mass surveillance of its citizens during the period 1950-1989 undertaken by its secret police service, which took the form of documents, audio recordings, ...moving footage, and approximately two million photographs. In late 1989 and early 1990, citizens of the GDR stormed the offices of the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, following a series of revolutions that shook Eastern Europe, marking the end of the postwar era and the division of Germany. Citizens occupied offices in Berlin, Leipzig, and other locations in order to halt the destruction of files by staff officials under orders to erase traces of its unlawful state surveillance actions. The regime is known for the precise rendering of its nation's citizens in observational reports and photographic recordings and this article considers the ways in which photography was utilized by the surveillance regime to infiltrate everyday lives. Further, the article examines in what ways these photographs reveal various surveillance techniques and indicate its limits in what can be considered as inadequate or illegible photographs. Lastly, it considers the remedial possibilities of the Stasi archive and its afterlife, or extra-archival legacy via artistic mediation.
John le Carré is credited with re-defining spy fiction into something widely considered as more 'authentic'. His work emerged during a period replete with spy scandals and public investigations. This ...article considers the intersection of the public history of intelligence with le Carré's early novels, particularly The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It reveals how the author drew creatively on that public history to shape his narratives and underpin the mood of his stories. Finally, it probes the 'insider knowledge' in the stories, illustrating that, contrary to le Carré's protestations, there exists a demonstrable correspondence between fact and fiction.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Stasi policed East German artists because of their potential dissident and ideological production. In contrast, Cornelia Schleime's Stasi Series (1993) reveals the ...secret police's preoccupation with her domesticity as a sign of her rebellion. For the photo-text series, the artist assigns fourteen excerpts of her Stasi file to as many self-portrait photographs. The images and texts inform each other, providing a biographical sketch of Schleime's life in two temporalities (the 1980s and 1993) and from two seemingly incommensurate perspectives (the Stasi and her own). The Stasi files document in careful detail Schleime's private life in the years that immediately preceded her 1984 emigration. Although the truth of these texts is suspect, the artist does not completely discredit them. Rather, she unites her file to her 1993 present by performing its contents in photographs that exhibit both mockery and resignation. This article considers how the artist's use of her archive reveals as much about the limitations of her Stasi source as it does about her unique perspective as both subject and interpreter. It examines Schleime's project in relation to contemporary archival and surveillance-oriented art practices to demonstrate how the Stasi Series adds to their concerns over information and power, memory and document, observation and self-representation.
