Kyberneticos Kommando :: Electro Bubble (Rhizonomics, RZN004, eng/ita)

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Demystification Committee :: Empire Management General Meeting @ Berlin (10th July, Postdamer Platz)

Global Gateway, Seychelles. The approximate legal location of one part of Empire Management.

"In inventing the homo oeconomicus, economists have engaged in a double abstraction. First, the unwarranted one of having conceived of a man with nothing human in his heart; second, of having represented this individual as detached from any group, corporation, sect, party, homeland, or association of any sort”

Gabriel Tarde, Psychologie économique, 1902

Read more @ Transmediale

The scale and complexity of the offshore financial system has come to light, as have many of its effects, but what of its day-to-day experience? What does it mean to be offshore; intentionally detached, and necessarily diffuse? Where is offshore, and can we go there? What do complex offshore structures look and feel like from within?

To begin to unpack these questions the Demystification Committee - a framework for art and research - has set up an international corporate structure across a number of jurisdictions: an Offshore Investigation Vehicle. At the head of this corporate structure is Empire Management Limited, a UK Private Limited Company. 

On Monday 10 July, Empire Management Limited will hold a general meeting of shareholders specifically aimed at onboarding new investors and introducing them to the current global structure of the company, its objectives, and its business strategies. Through this meeting shareholders will engage in participatory examples of the business strategies of the company and its offshore subsidiaries, as well as discussing and voting on resolutions that shape its future.

Attendees will need to be shareholders in Empire Management Limited for as little as the duration of the meeting, or — should they so wish — for the lifetime of the company. For as long as they are shareholders, attendees will have the right to attend (physically or virtually) any of the company’s general meetings at which they will be able to, among other things, vote on company resolutions and experience further offshore investment and tactics.

Empire Management General Meeting

Monday 10 July, 14:00-18:00

PretiumOffices

Potsdamer Platz 5

10785, Berlin

The process of becoming a shareholder will be taken care of prior to the meeting’s commencement - shares cost €1, and the company offers an immediate buyback scheme. If you would like to invest in Empire Management Limited and attend the General Meeting, please email with a little about why you would like to be involved.

The sun never sets on Empire Management.

Related participants: Demystification Committee it gb, Obsolete Capitalism (it wo), and Kyberneticos Kommando (cy, wo), Total Bureau (cy, wo) and many more...

Related texts: Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research 2017: Demystification Committee

Demystification Committee :: E' tempo di EMPIRE MANAGEMENT !! @ Fussler Research Archive

Global Gateway, Seychelles: l’indirizzo legale di una delle sussidiarie di EMPIRE MANAGEMENT.

"Nell’inventare l’homo oeconomicus, gli economisti si sono impegnati in una doppia astrazione. Da un lato, l’aver concepito un uomo con nulla di umano in cuore; dall’altro l’aver rappresentato questo individuo come distaccato da qualsiasi gruppo, societá, partito, setta, o comunità di qualunque tipo."—Gabriel Tarde, Psychologie économique, 1902

Le dimensioni e la complessità del sistema finanziario offshore (colloquialmente noto come "paradiso fiscale”) stanno venendo sempre piú alla luce, così come le nefaste conseguenze economiche di questo apparato in continua crescita. Ma cosa significa essere offshore? Dove si trova il paradiso fiscale? In mare aperto? E, sopratutto, é possibile visitarlo?

Per rispondere a queste domande, il Demystification Committee - un collettivo che si impegna in ricerca artistica - ha creato una struttura aziendale internazionale che attraversa il Regno Unito, le Seychelles e Saint Vincent e Grenadine: un Veicolo di Investigazione Offshore. A capo di questa struttura siede EMPIRE MANAGEMENT, una societá per azioni britannica.

Lunedì 10 Luglio, EMPIRE MANAGEMENT vi invita ad una riunione generale finalizzata ad individuare nuovi investitori, tutti voi, rendervi famigliari con la struttura aziendale e discutere possibili strategie di business. Diventando azionisti scoprirete quali trucchi e cortocircuiti legali permettono ad EMPIRE MANAGEMENT di operare a distanza, rimanere anonimi ed effettuare operazioni finanziarie. Potrete inoltre proporre, discutere e votare possibili investimenti futuri.

Le azioni costano soltanto 1€ ed in caso di necessità EMPIRE MANAGEMENT si impegna a ricomprarle a fine giornata. Potrete infatti concludere il rapporto con la societá a fine riunione o, se lo desiderate, rimanere azionisti a tempo indeterminato. Questo vi darà diritto di partecipare alle prossime riunioni generali e sperimentare ulteriormente con le tattiche del mondo offshore.

Per partecipare, mandate una email a secretary@empire.management indicando il nome, la professione e il metodo di partecipazione (fisica o virtuale via Skype).

Lunedì 10 Luglio, 14:00-18:00
PretiumOffices
Potsdamer Platz 5
10785, Berlino

Read more @ Transmediale

The Nauru Elegies: The Hidden Geometry of Global Commerce by Paul D. Miller

SUBLIMINAL KID PRODUCTIONS The Nauru Elegies:
The Idea of an Island

'As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.’ 
Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) 1849

Project Description

The Republic of Nauru is a small island in the South Pacific Ocean. It is the world's smallest independent state and, at its core, represents a place at the most remote extreme of the planet. Its seemingly utopic geography and landscape stages a dystopic economy and society. It was, by consensus of several “Great Powers”, used as a raw resource until there was literally, nothing left. Nauru has been mined throughout the last two centuries for its phosphate deposits, which occupied 90% of the island. In the 1980s, phosphate exports briefly gave Nauruans one of the highest per capita incomes in the Third World. It is anticipated that the phosphate reserves will be completely exhausted before 2050. Despite this, the unemployment rate currently stands at 90%.

As a small territory with no exploitable resources, in the 1990’s Nauru turned to off-shore financing, and the creation of “virtual banks” as a way of earning sorely needed foreign currency. As such, it mirrors the off-shore island economies of The Cayman Islands, and continental havens like Luxembourg and Switzerland. As the Soviet Union collapsed, hundreds of billions of dollars “vanished” through the digital networks of the global financial system through places like Nauru, to re-appear in banks all over the world as “clean money.” For further information, view Jack Hitt’s December 10, 2000 article in the New York Times “The Billion-Dollar Shack”

The Nauru Elegies project looks at the combination of unique qualities that make a remote place like Nauru a core member of the 21st century global economy: It explores an island in a state of environmental collapse caused by deep seated financial irregularities, and how they affected the landmass of the island to the point of devastation. The Nauru Elegies posits that Nauru is a reflection site of many of the issues facing our contemporary information economy. The music component of the Nauru Elegies reflects colonial and postcolonial issues facing the digital economy of the 21st century translated into a string quartet, composed by Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, while the literary and multimedia component of the project spatializes and formalizes otherwise invisible economic flows and irreversible ecological devastation. Based on Miller’s explorations of the island, and his readings of texts like the economist Raj Patel’s economic treatise “The Value of Nothing,” Jared Diamond’s “Collapse,” Aldous Huxley’s last novel “Island,” Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island” (La Possibilité d'une île, 2005), Paul Virilio’s “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” and other historical texts, Miller has fashioned an “acoustic portrait” of the island. At heart, the Nauru Elegies is an art installation that explores the linkages between music composition, information structures based on economics, and new forms of GPS based locational media (architecture and design are also components) in collision with local infrastructure of an island in radical environmental collapse. The “Nauru Elegies” explores the uneasy tension between local versus global financial markets, and how they translate into aesthetics. In the “Nauru Elegies” a new digital media architecture reclaims an “autonomous zone” in the hyper-networked systems of global finance that contemporary life calls home.

Tax and data havens are black holes in the global financial system, and Nauru represented a place where a vast amount of finance “disappeared” into the mega-structures of the global financial markets. Nauru Elegies represents a virtual territory at a culmination of global currents, and creates music compositions that reflect that kind of virtuality.

The poet Goethe and the philosopher Schelling both once wrote: “architecture is nothing but frozen music.” The Nauru Elegies asks what happens if we reverse engineer that process through on-site recordings and footage translated through the prism of music and architectural form? The end result is an installation and music composition that blur the lines between what an artist creates and how a composer engages the 21st century’s information economy.

Technical write-up 

'The Nauru Elegies' is a technical synthesis of a live string ensemble, projected high-definition video footage, digital animation and live internet feed of GPS coordinates of specific aspects of the island and its physical and financial infrastructure. It is an orchestration of content retrieved and processed in multiple localities including research in New York City and documentation in Nauru. The “Elegies” are a statement of technology and media processes in the 21st century that is exponentially progressing to a more dematerialized and delocalized state.

Read & Listen more @ Dj Spooky.com

Angus Cameron lecture on Headless @ The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (13th Dec, 2008)

"Les artistes 100 têtes: Multitext, Xenomoney, Xenospace" - Lecture by Dr Angus Cameron (Human Geographer at University of Leicester) acting as the emissary of artist collaboration Goldin+Senneby for the exhibition Headless at The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada, December 13th 2008.