UN-PUBLISH (2.01)

by Ami Clarke

 

 

UN-PUBLISH 2.01

Publisher: Banner Repeater 2011

printed by Newsfax (Printers of the Financial Times UK)

16-page folded paper, edition of: 500. 19 x 24.5 cm.  Colour - digital print

ISSN 2050-795X

 

UN-PUBLISH (2.01) by Ami Clarke, touches upon some perhaps misleading ideas regarding technology, open-ness and democracy. Despite the seemingly democratic and open space of Web 2.0 and the global accessibility this platform suggess, the management of on-line data is exceptionally open to abuse in that it is very easy to delete, so that no trace is ever evident of it having been there. you would have had to know it was there in the first place.

 

Julian Assange (Wikileaks founder) whilst in conversation with Hans Ulrich Olbrist talks about ideas relating to this, which he calls: "Un-publishing". 

 

Contrary to what we may suspect, traditional print media has a potentially longer shelf life, through the wide distribution of papers that resist the censorious reach of authorities, commercially or politically motivated.

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UN-PUBLISH (2.01) focus' on the communications between people in the life of Chelsea Manning, a US soldier who was arrested May 2010 in Iraq, and charged in July with transferring classified data onto her personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source, whom many have speculated was Julian Assange (Wikileaks), and that informed the leaked information that became widely known as 'cable-gate'.

 

The meta-ficton by Ami Clarke, appropriates the instant messenger conversations published by the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Wired, between Manning, Zach Analok and Adrian Lamo, to consider a young person at great odds with their situation as they await discharge for "occupational problem and adjustment disorder" after an argument with a female officer, having told their master sergeant they were suffering from gender identity disorder. Their texts are ideologically invested in both freedom of information and speech, and contextualized, inflected and infected by the language of sci-fi and Holliwood thrillers.

 

It is printed on Financial Times paper, by the press that publishes the Financial Times and the Metro, amongst others.

 

No one suspected a thing. (I) listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while "exfiltrating" possibly the largest data spillage in America History" (Chelsea Manning)