This past Thursday evening the York Centre for International & Security Studies hosted a talk entitled "The Culture, Technology and Ethics of Virtuous War" as part of an ongoing lecture series on dillemmas in Canadian Security. The featured speaker at this event was James Der Derian (of the Watson Institute for International Studies), an Oxford educated scholar who examines military strategy in light of flows of information, visual culture and ethics. I was only obliquely familiar with Der Derian before the talk but it was extremely accessible for me as he very much framed his thinking regarding American warfare in relationship to the work Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virillio – simulation and speed were both frequent points of reference.

[Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media Entertainment Network (2nd Edition), video trailer]

Der Derian's talk presented a nuanced reading of the idea of the "virtuous" war by focusing on a range of contemporary techniques for managing the battlefield that included predator drones, embedded anthropologists and recent shifts in the tone of military training. He also presented a few exciting film projects that were packed with interviews with leading military thinkers and strategists. The following notes provide a general overview of his informal lecture:

• Der Derian opens talk by pointing out that the phrase virtuous war is a "felicitous oxymoron".
• His scholarship is particularly indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. The focus of the latter on of the mass production of objects and images is more relevant than ever.
• While Baudrillard famously stated that "The Gulf War did not take place" to suggest that the 1990-91 conflict was emblematic of a new type of warfare. In pinpointing the origins of this new "simulated" battlefield Der Derian cites a slightly earlier moment: February 1989 – as Gorbachev announced governmental reform in the Soviet Union, American soldiers were busy battling the Krasnovians (a fake Russian regiment) in war games at Fort Irwin, George Bush was present at this event and the following transpired: "Kitted out in a photo-opportunistic ensemble of camouflage jacket, pin-strip trousers, and wing-tip shows, Bush used a radio link to tell the 2,689 players spread-out over the Mojave Desert that "we are pleased to see Chairman Gorbachev's proposal to expand steps towards pluralism in the Soviet Union." Inspired, the "Soviet" 197th Krasnovian Motorized Rifle Regiment made borscht out of the U.S. Third Brigade..." (quote culled from Der Derian's "The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars").
• The Military-industrial complex is an antiquated concept and the commercial sector/defense assemblage is better described as the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-net). [See also Ed Halter's From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Videogames]
• Drone attacks have quadrupled under Obama.
• Shock and awe as media performance. Note the brilliant montage of Wesley Clark, Arthur Cebrowski and Virillio from 6:00-8:30 in the video embedded above. Cebrowski dismissing the idea of equality on the battlefield: "That is not the American way of war. We love Super Bowls – we want to see the opposition swept off the field."
• The last third of the talk addressed the controversial Human Terrain System project which embeds anthropologists and social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are numerous ethical questions posed by this endeavour as it (arguably) "weaponizes" the social sciences and attempts to instrumentalize American cultural engagement in foreign countries. Der Derian (and collaborators David and Michael Udris) have recently completed Human Terrain, a documentary examining this troubled initiative.

The above smattering of bullet points does not do Der Derian's presentation justice – I wasn't in top note taking form at this event and I admit to cherry picking the topics that most interested me. Rest assured that the recently updated Virtuous War has been added to my "to read" list.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing a "human representative" of The Pinky Show give a talk contextualizing their work. For the uninitiated, The Pinky Show is an American social justice-focused animated series starring a group of cats. Winnipeg Free Press writer Alison Gillmor succinctly described the web video series as "Noam Chomsky by way of Hello Kitty" and this definition works – each episode tackles heavy issues and carefully considers their complexities in a manner that is both accessible and (morosely) entertaining. Past shows have examined formal education, illegal immigration, the legality of the Iraq War, GMOs and the nuances of these charged topics are thoroughly researched and parsed very finely. The show has an explicit interest in language and watching any of the above episodes will illustrate how attentive the writers are in peeling back dominant cultural narratives and reconsidering definitions that we sometimes take for granted.

Due to a few sharp curators, The Pinky Show has recently popped up on the radar of the Canadian art scene and the team behind the project just launched show at the Toronto Free Gallery entitled "Class Treason Stories". This video project is presented in an exhibition context as a series of large format prints of Pinky, Bunny, Mimi and Kim – the all-feline cast of the series. Yesterday John (no last name given) gave a talk that presented the backstory of the team's foray into web video and how their project has evolved over the last five years.

[Pinky & Bunny / I'M ON UR LAND / MAPPIN UR DEMIZE, from the On Native Land series / 2008]

A recurring theme within the "Class Treason Stories" artist talk was the struggle for financial subsistence. Since The Pinky Show is not a standard publication, art practice or child-friendly animated series, obtaining funding for the project has proved difficult. The project is registered as a non-profit and has two full-time writers/producers, a half-time "organizer" and the only source of revenue has been (meagre) merchandise sales, donations and a few timely grants. A defining moment in the early life of the project occurred when one of their 2007 episodes was featured on the front page of YouTube – this video now has more than 750,000 views and the YouTube channel for the project has reached 7.5 million people. Granted, there are countless videos on the Internet that have reached an audience of a hundred thousand but given that this project deals with touchy subjects like ideology or the definition of war crimes, how has the show managed to cultivate such a large viewership?

[Pinky & Bunny / I'M ON UR LAND / MAPPIN UR DEMIZE, detail]

John confessed that he was still quite perplexed by the success the show had enjoyed in certain countries and networks but was quick to point out that the daily routine at The Pinky Show HQ consisted of being rejected for grants and answering hate mail. He also expressed confusion regarding the fact that the project appealed to the art world but seemed a little more comfortable with the idea of turning the research and iconography associated with the show into "sellable artifacts" rather than strictly relying on merchandise sales to fund the project. It was fascinating to hear the care that goes into the writing of The Pinky Show applied to an on-the-fly contextualization of the project and John concluded that people "accepted" the show precisely because it was animated – nobody demands to know the academic history of a hand drawn cat. While this point was delivered as a punchline, it underscored an intense suspicion of institutionalized education and academic credentialing.

Another reason that the show is somewhat accessible is that it appropriates one of the qualities most valued online—cuteness—and subverts it to serve as a delivery device for cultural commentary. I'M ON UR LAND / MAPPIN UR DEMIZE (shown above) is a brilliant example of a generic Internet meme being redeployed to highlight connections between cartography, power, historical narratives and the plight of the indigenous peoples of North America.

What I found most appealing about this excellent talk was John's description of something he referred to as the "monster institution". During the presentation there were many references to (past) frustrations that The Pinky Show team had while working as educators – they felt that between administration and departmental infighting they had no time remaining to dedicate to their own learning. Rather than continue working in an institution they no longer had faith in, they created their own (the show) where the primary mandate was to spend each and every day researching and bettering themselves while developing quality content. John warned that the danger of the monster institution is that nobody will take you seriously for years but their project is a shining example of how good, self-published content can find an audience.

"We Love Museums...Do Museums Love Us Back?" is probably my favourite episode of The Pinky Show as it skewers museum/gallery culture and all the expertise associated with programming it. I urge you to check out this great video series and if you're interested in learning more about the project you should track down a copy of this month's issue of FUSE magazine (as it has a feature article on Pinky & Co.).

But what happens to the building in this constellation of ideas? The status of the building itself as it is multiply (and simultaneously) positioned within its architectural history and the history of architecture and the theories of history is a case in point. The building is the object of the history of architecture, but it is a slippery kind of object with respect to theories of history. The building is a document of something that happened. It is a document of great transparency (translatability), because it is the concretization of what happened (mediated by the historian—the "agent," in historical terms, of the document is absent). Simultaneously it is a document of extreme opacity because of its use as a functional object over time (and its consequent physical functional change over time); because of its consumption-appropriation over time—the building serves as a model for other buildings; and, the nature of this consumption being historically more appropriate than allusive, because of a difficulty of "reading" it as a single document.

- Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. New York: Yale University Press, 1993. Pg. 22.