Today I was part of a peaceful march to parliament to ask for government action against the recent afrophobic and xenophobic attacks that have been happening around South Africa. We were a group of about 20 students, and after gathering for about an hour a police brigade came and started pushing us away telling us we couldn’t be there (granted the SA system is fucked up enough already that you need a ‘permit’ simply to protest).
They then grabbed one of our protestors and pulled him to the ground and we all started shouting and trying to pull him back, next thing you know, 2 stun grenades go off??
It happened so quickly I was still half reaching over to grab our dude but I wasn’t sure if shots had gone off or what - my ears felt like they’d been ripped off and my body was frozen and my vision was way blurry.
Things calmed down we regathered and continued singing after a while. So the cops just brought more intimidation - eventually there were 11 police vehicles with an army of men in bulletproof vests??
We were 20 students singing outside parliament?? Literal no one was aggressive and no one had any form of weapon.
It’s just crazy for me how the police are supposedly here to protect us but they greeted us with such aggression, condescendence and force right from the beginning. Not to mention we’re asking the government to respond to the attacks that have been happening - where people from Africa have been burning alive other people from Africa. It’s fucked up and people don’t realise how constructed this all is. It all started with the fucking colonialists. How the power structures insidiously turn people against they’re own. How the statue looming over our protest outside parliament was of Louis Botha triumphantly atop his steed credited as “soldier, farmer, warrior” or some racist shit and then that the very police general who dropped those fucking stun grenades on our PEACEFUL gathering shares that same bloody name.
The legacy of colonialism and apartheid is still so deeply entrenched in the system we live in that if you merely question it you’re immediately condemned as vermin, or even in your existence you will be considered such and someone like me (ie white) won’t get that same reception??
This kind of a struggle is something people have to engage with everyday. People die over ‘illegal protests’ - what is that?? You’re expressing your pain and now it’s not legal??
Fuck.
And then people actually complain that we finally got the statue of Cecil fucking Rhodes taken down. Yoh this country is deep
(Source: bersiker, via out-gayed-myself)
Marina Gonzalez Eme, Portraits.
Intense, often demonic portraits by Marina Gonzalez Eme that surpass the horrific into something beautiful.
Continue below to see even more by Marina:
(Source: supersonicart.com, via supersonicart)
After Twitter bot makes death threat, its owner gets questioned by police — Fusion
Robots are starting to break the law, the law is trying to figure out what to do about it, and it all seems to be happening in Europe. Last month, Swiss authorities seized the Random Darknet Shopper art exhibit which included weekly purchases made by an automated bot given Bitcoin to surf a Dark Web marketplace. (It mainly bought drugs.) This week, police in the Netherlands are dealing with a robot miscreant. Amsterdam-based developer Jeffry van der Goot reports on Twitter that he was questioned by police because a Twitter bot he owned made a death threat.
Van der Goot’s bot used his own tweets as fodder, taking random chunks of them and trying to recombine them into new sentences that made sense. According to van der Goot, the bot tweeted something that sounded like a threat which mentioned an upcoming event in Amsterdam. Best of all, the bot was responding to another bot, according to van der Goot. He is not identifying the bot and says he has deleted it, per the request of the police. If this is not a hoax, this may be the first time police had to respond because of a robot-on-robot threat of violence.
Félix Vallotton + Kees van Dongen + James Ensor + Michelangelo + Kubrick
this is too much
👆
Simply brilliant
(via aantics)
Deep Lab: a film about the all-women hacker collective making art about the Post-Snowden Age.
“As an artist, I want to reinterpret culture in a way that society can parse.” said Addie Wagenknecht, the multimedia artist who organized Deep Lab during her ongoing fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon. “You take these big events and try to encapsulate them in a way that you can present them concisely and quickly so that it’s defined for people who experience that piece or exhibition.”
A chapter in the book compiled by data artist Ingrid Burrington is comprised of 20 pages listing objects pulled from the Pentagon’s 1033 program—which has supplied military hardware to local police for decades—in plain black text. After four solid pages of “5.56 MILLIMETRE RIFLE,” it becomes clear that Deep Lab is not only artistically compelling and tantalizingly oblique in how it approaches issues of life and death, but deadly serious.
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