Striptease: An investigation of curatorial practices for fashion in the museum

This research project investigates models of curatorial practice for fashion. The study centres upon questions of what is represented and what is missing in the museum experience of fashion? Typically the museum system is understood as one of ordered arrangement and selection. But in the project I appropriate the burlesque act of Striptease as both a metaphor and parody for critique of fashionable clothing within the conditions of the museological setting. The act of taking off clothes, removing garments from a body, the falling away of things from fixed arrangements is a process I apply to curatorial practice for revealing the actions of fashion through the familiar ritual of dressing. The study is founded upon the Western conceptions of clothes and fashion put forward in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Roland Barthes. These ‘fashion theorists’ emphasise a sense of ‘worldliness’ that suggest participating in fashion through the everyday practices of dressing/wear and associated social networks. In the curating of two exhibitions for the project and in this text, I begin to test these ideas about consumption and circulation of fashion as articulated by the appearances of ‘new’ or ‘used’ clothes. From these findings and my studies in the field I will present the experience and meanings connected to dressing detail and diversity of appearance as a way to curate the fashion experience without wearing clothes or setting garments in motion. In my conclusion, I will argue that the discoveries in the research propose the curation of dressing gestures and transformational states convey a language of fashion rarely explored in current museum practices

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Restructuring and repositioning Shenzhen, China's new mega city

Shenzhen, a new mega city founded under China’s ‘open door’ policy, has experienced dramatic urban development over the past thirty years. From humble beginnings as a fishing village before the 1980s, it benefited from locational advantage next to Hong Kong, an autonomous city with a global role in finance and trade. Shenzhen was first among cities in China to adapt the capitalist world’s urban development practices to an indigenous, centrally controlled land management system. As a new city, Shenzhen may best represent the role of planning in a time of economic transition. Urban planning in Shenzhen was ambitious in its reach, using ‘experimental reform’ as a vehicle for institutionalizing changes in management of the land resource. These reforms became generalized in China, leading to a recent decline in academic investigation of Shenzhen. While the city as ‘reformer’ seems to have run its course, new challenges upset the old assumptions and call for more research. Today, as industry moves inland away from increasingly costly coastal areas, the city is grappling with the need to restructure its economic base. The city has undertaken major infrastructural projects in a bid to secure its role as a major transhipment hub and logistics command centre, while also developing a rail-based mass transit system. The regeneration of disused industrial land and ‘urban villages’, built up to accommodate at low cost a huge factory workforce, are important ongoing city programmes. While the city extends its infrastructure to connect more effectively with the rest of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and with Hong Kong, more fundamental questions surround its role within a restructuring regional economy. Ambitions for international stature, bolstered by a large and young population base, a world-class port and modern facilities are challenged by a rapidly evolving regional economy

China: New Engine of World Growth

Twenty-five years of reform have transformed China from a centrally planned and closed system to a predominantly market-driven and open economy. As a consequence, China is emerging as the new powerhouse for the world economy. China: new engine for world growth discusses the impact and significance of this transformation. It points out risks to the growth process and unfinished tasks of reform. It presents conclusions from recent research on growth, trade and investment, the financial sector, income and regional disparities, industrial location and private sector development. Ross Garnaut is a Professor of Economics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, and Chairman of the China Economy and Business Program at The Australian National University. He was Australia’s Ambassador to China in the 1980s. Ligang Song is a Fellow in the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, and Director of the China Economy and Business Program at The Australian National University

Global Art Market in the Aftermath of COVID-19

Although the global art market has often been resilient to international economic and political events, it has recently faced some of its biggest challenges under the influence of COVID-19. Among others, the pandemic and the accompanying restrictive administrative measures taken by world governments have significantly influenced such key economic indicators as gallery employment, art sales, and the organization of international art fairs. The Special Issue "Global Art Market in the Aftermath of COVID-19" studies various economic, social, and political impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global art market’s current state and future evolution

Biopolitics of Climate Change: Carbon Commodities, Environmental Profanations, and the Lost Innocence of Use-Value

The analytical core of this study is the historical development of the relationship between nature and the capitalist mode of production. In particular, we aim at shedding light on the process through which the “grammar” of ecological crisis (and consequently of its possible solutions) turned into an exclusively economic one. In addressing this issue we discuss the successive problematisations of the environment that took place since the emergence of biopolitical governmentality (late Eighteenth century). Following Foucault\u27s intuition, and supplementing it with aspects of Marxist analysis, we argue for a profound transformation – based on a crucial leap of abstraction – of the notion of nature: from enacting limit to the economic process to fundamental element of market valorisation. Especially, we show how this modification discloses a new way to approach contemporary commodification, organised around the crucial notion of general intellect. Carbon commodities, for instance, should be conceived of as second order abstractions: in them, the differentiation between natural distinctness of use-value and economic equivalence of exchange value tends to blur since a decisive element of their exchange-value resides in the ex ante creation of capital-based use-values. Hence, use-value loses its innocence. The neoliberalisation of nature is analysed – with specific regard to the climate crisis – both from the perspective of its supporters (carbon traders), and from the standpoint of its critics (climate justice activists). Carbon trading – and the dogma upon which it rests – is understood as a material-discursive device through which climate change is seen as a market failure whose only possible solution lies, paradoxically, in further implementing market-based policies. By contrast, climate resistance is the multifarious disarticulation of this dogma. Such a transnational movement is approached through the concept of carbon profanations, which simultaneously possesses a deconstructive component – whose aim is to disarticulate the supports of carbon trading dogma – and a creative element – whose goal is to establish concrete-prefigurative organisational configurations, irreducible to a regime of truth centred around the marketisation of global warming. Finally, an empirical analysis of Durban\u27s COP17 is proposed as a background against which to interpret the transformative potential of climate struggles, with particular focus on the notion of planetary climate as a global common/s