MachineMachine /stream - tagged with london https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[Arts Week 2018]]> http://www.flickr.com/photos/birkbeckmediaservices/41373488055/

Birkbeck Media Services / Dominic Mifsud

Casting Code: reflections on 3D printing

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Tue, 22 May 2018 03:22:40 -0700 http://www.flickr.com/photos/birkbeckmediaservices/41373488055/
<![CDATA[Fatberg 'autopsy' reveals growing health threat to Londoners | UK news | The Guardian]]> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/24/fatberg-autopsy-reveals-growing-health-threat-londoners

Fatbergs, the congealed mass of fat and discarded items that are increasingly blocking Britain’s sewers, are the consequence of the plastic crisis in Britain and contain potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria, tests show.

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Tue, 24 Apr 2018 16:34:15 -0700 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/24/fatberg-autopsy-reveals-growing-health-threat-londoners
<![CDATA[The Fatberg Cometh | Sam Kriss]]> https://thebaffler.com/the-horrordome/the-fatberg-returns

These are just the facts. On July 22, 2013, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to her first child, Prince George. Two weeks later, an enormous “fatberg” was discovered in the sewers under London.

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Sun, 01 Oct 2017 16:03:01 -0700 https://thebaffler.com/the-horrordome/the-fatberg-returns
<![CDATA[Moreshin Allahyari: She Who Sees the Unknown, Ya’jooj Majooj]]> http://additivism.org/post/160888702891

Moreshin Allahyari: She Who Sees the Unknown, Ya’jooj Majooj An interview with the artist Moreshin Allahyari about her commission for The Photographers’ Gallery’s Media Wall - See Who Sees the Unknown, Ya'jooj Ma'jooj. Artwork © the artist, Video © The Photographers’ Gallery, 2017

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Sat, 20 May 2017 16:14:49 -0700 http://additivism.org/post/160888702891
<![CDATA[Morehshin Allahyari: She Who Sees the Unknown, Ya'jooj Majooj]]> https://vimeo.com/218147411

An interview with the artist Moreshin Allahyari about her commission for The Photographers' Gallery's Media Wall - See Who Sees the Unknown, Ya'jooj Ma'jooj. Artwork © the artist, Video © The Photographers' Gallery, 2017Cast: The Photographers' GalleryTags: Moreshin Allahyari, Ya'jooj Ma'jooj and The Photographers' Gallery

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Sat, 20 May 2017 16:11:39 -0700 https://vimeo.com/218147411
<![CDATA[Tate Series: Digital Thresholds: from Information to Agency (public event)]]> http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/courses-and-workshops/digital-thresholds-information-agency

I will deliver this 4-week public series at The Tate Modern throughout July 2016. Sign up! Thanks to Viktoria Ivanova for working with me to achieve this.

Data is the lifeblood of today’s economic and social systems. Drones, satellites and CCTV cameras capture digital images covertly, while smartphones we carry feed data packets into the cloud, fought over by corporations and governments. How are we to make sense of all this information? Who is to police and distribute it? And what kind of new uses can art put it to? This four-week series led by writer/artist Daniel Rourke will explore the politics and potential of big data through the lens of contemporary art and the social sciences. Participants will assess the impact the digital revolution has had on notions of value attached to the invisible, the territorial and the tangible. We will look at artists and art activists who tackle the conditions of resolution, algorithmic governance, digital colonialism and world-making in their work, with a focus on key news events yet to unfold in 2016. Session 1 Hito Steyerl: Poor Image Politics In this first session we will examine the politics of image and data resolution, with special attention to the work of artist Hito Steyerl represented in the Tate Collection. How do poor images influence the significance and value of the events they depict? What can online cultures that fetishise poor quality teach us about the economics and autonomy of information? Is being a low resolution event in a field of high resolutions an empowering proposition? Session 2 Morehshin Allahyari: Decolonising the Digital Archive 3D scanning and printing technologies are becoming common tools for archaeologists, archivists and historians. We will examine the work of art activists who question these technologies, connecting the dots from terroristic networks, through the price of crude oil, to artefacts being digitally colonised by Western institutions. Artist Morehshin Allahyari will join us via skype to talk about Material Speculation: ISIS – a series of artifacts destroyed by ISIS in 2015, which Allahyari then ‘recreated’ using digital tools and techniques. Session 3 Mishka Henner: Big Data and World Making In this session we will explore the work of artists who channel surveillance and big data into the poetic re-making of worlds. We will compare and contrast nefarious ‘deep web’ marketplaces with ‘real world’ auction houses selling artworks to a global elite. Artist Mishka Henner will join us via skype to talk about artistic appropriation, subversion and the importance of provocation. Session 4 Forensic Architecture: Blurring the Borders between Forensics, Law and Art The Forensic Architecture project uses analytical methods for reconstructing scenes of war and violence inscribed within spatial artefacts and environments. In this session we will look at their work to read and mobilise ‘ambient’ information gathered from satellites, mobile phones and CCTV/news footage. How are technical thresholds implicated in acts of war, terrorism and atrocity, and how can they be mobilised for resist and deter systemic violence?

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Tue, 17 May 2016 07:23:50 -0700 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/courses-and-workshops/digital-thresholds-information-agency
<![CDATA[What’s the Value of Recreating the Palmyra Arch with Digital...]]> http://additivism.org/post/143110811665

What’s the Value of Recreating the Palmyra Arch with Digital Technology?Seven months after ISIS destroyed Palmyra’s 1,800-year-old Arch of Triumph, the structure has risen once more — but this time 2,800 miles away from the ancient city, in London’s bustling Trafalgar Square.

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Wed, 20 Apr 2016 05:51:49 -0700 http://additivism.org/post/143110811665
<![CDATA["Please don't call me uncanny": Cécile B. Evans at Seventeen Gallery]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/dec/4/please-dont-call-me-uncanny-hyperlinks-seventeen-g

Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or it didn't happen (2014). Still frame from HD video. Courtesy of Seventeen. Media saturation in the internet's "cut & paste" ecology has become so naturalized that contemporary film's collaged aspects are not readily considered. Who are the subjects in, for example, a Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch film? And for whom do they perform? When I show these films in my class, my students switch tabs in their browsers, Snapchat each other, like photos, fav tweets—often on multiple screens at once—then state that this "work is about strange fake-tanned kids' search for a toilet." What has made this answer stay in my mind pertains to the word "about." When used for these works, the banal statement "this work is about…" registers as a crisis of categorical closure that the simultaneous existence of disparate, accumulated content on a single screen constantly thwarts. Central to Cécile B. Evans' show Hyperlinks at Seventeen Gallery in London is the video-essay, Hyperlinks or it didn't happen, displayed on a high-resolution TV with headphone cords installed at a comfortable cartoon-watching height in a corner of the space. Entering at the opposite corner, I navigate the gallery space, attempting to link the objects together—a prosthetic leg atop an upturned Eames chair replica near a rubber plant that counterbalances a plexiglass structure supporting 3D-printed arms (One Foot In The Grave, 2014), another Eames replica sitting in one corner (just a chair), various prints on the floor and walls—before sitting down, cross-legged, on a thick-pile rug strewn with postcard-sized images.  

Cécile B. Evans, "Hyperlinks," Installation view. Courtesy of Seventeen. The film begins with a super high-resolution render of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman's head floating over the shimmering image of a jellyfish. "I'm not magic, and please don't call me uncanny," says a synthetically-augmented human voice. "I'm just a bad copy made too perfectly, too soon." The video lingers on Hoffman's face. His lips do not move — at least, not in sync with the voice claiming to be the bad copy. "Fuck. Fuck FUCKING FUCK! I am full of him." An audience laughter track plays. The bad copy's hair flutters as his head bobs. The follicles on his nose look like they'd be the perfect environment for a blackhead to take up residence. The subject floating on the screen does not symbolize Hoffman, rather, it is an improper metaphor for the actor's "untimely death'; for anything that transcends description, yet is saturated with meaning nonetheless. Hyperlinks is so full of meaning that, as the voice suggests, it is set to burst. Evans wants us to feel uncomfortable at the absence of an uncanny feeling, and by referring to this lack directly in the monologue of the simulated voice, she sets up a relation the viewer and this, a highly stylized, digital avatar. Hoffman, the image-thing, is not really a metaphor, nor is he really a copy, a simulation, or even a simulacrum of a more-real body. Hoffman, the image-thing, is literal and actual, perhaps more so to the viewer than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the flesh-and-blood human or his "untimely death" was/will/could ever be. In her 2010 essay A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl defines the image as a thing whose "immortality… originates… from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated." [1] Like the postcards strewn throughout Hyperlinks, the floating, self-referential Hoffman points out a literal truth: Hoffman's head is an "improper metaphor" [2] for the image that it actually is.  Catachresis, a term we can employ for such "improper metaphors," is a forced extension of meaning employed when "when no proper, or literal, term is available." [3] According to Vivian Sobchack, "catachresis is differentiated from proper metaphor insofar as it forces us to confront" [4] the deficiency and failure of language. In linking across the gap between figural and literal meaning, catachresis marks the precise moment "where living expression states living existence." [5] The image-things of Evans' film are similarly analogically hyperlinked to the metaphors they supposedly express. In several sequences, an invisible, green-screened woman wanders a beach with a man who we are told is her partner: the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, The Invisible Man. For a few seconds, we are confronted with Marlon Brando's floating head, isolated from scenes deleted from Superman II (1980) to be digitally repurposed for the 2006 film Superman Returns, so the actor could reprise his role as Superman's father two years after his death.

The vocaloid pop-star Hatsune Miku serenades us with the song "Forever Young," referencing her own immortality in the server banks and USB sticks that confer her identity. We then see, rolling onto a stage in Canada, Edward Snowden gives a TED talk on taking back the web, through a "Telepresence Robot" (an object that looks like a flat-panel screen attached to a Segway). As in a collage, the film splices and dices contiguous space and time, producing a unique configuration of catachretic associations, rather than a continuous narrative about something. Fictions are interwoven with facts, gestures with statements, figures with subjects. Moving about the gallery, the viewer hovers about the strewn postcard-sized images of a counterfeit Kermit the Frog, the render of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the "hologram" of Michael Jackson. The image-things in Evans' work seem to exist beyond subject/object distinctions, outside of sense, above their own measure of themselves —selves that they, nonetheless, frequently seem to be measuring and re-measuring. The exhibition comes with its own printed glossary of terms listing references the video makes. The first term in the glossary is "Hyperlink":               A reference to external data that a reader can open either by clicking or by hovering over a point of origin. From Greek hyper (prep. And adv.) "over, beyond, overmuch, above measure." Here again the figural and literal are called into question. In relation to what can one say the "external" or "beyond" of a hyperlink resides? Why is the etymology for "link" not also given? Though at first, the glossary seems to map the associations, the links, of the disparate imagery presented in the show, it is suggestive of the total-work, presenting an almost anarchistic circulation of imagery as a coherent system. The glossary's reification of associations gestures towards also the internet's systemic interpellation of our networked subjecthood; as well as in the film title's reference to the phrase "Pics, or it didn't happen," the show's contrast between a body's lifespan and a circulating digital image seems to also echo of our status as "poor copies" of our digital semblances. The image-things in "Hyperlinks" serve – to hijack the words of Scott Bukatman - "as the partial and fragmented representations that they are." [6] . Through the works' superfluity of associations and meanings, I found myself considering the impossibility of categorical closure. If totalization means incorporating all disparate things, an ultimate difference erupts: a moment that also signals the deficiency and failure of systemization itself. What makes Evans work successful is this endless calling up of the specter of the beyond, the outside, the everything else, from within the perceived totality of the internet. With the glossary, the totality of the show almost feels performative, gesturing towards the systemic totalizing we confer onto art objects in a gallery space before, after, and, especially, during their imaging. But image-things are considerably more liberated than either objects or subjects. They are more real, precisely because we recognize them as images.

[1] Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” in The Wretched of the Screen, e-flux Journal (Sternberg Press, 2012), 46–59.

[2] Vivian Carol Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 81.

[3] Richard Shiff, “Cezanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch,” in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 150.

[4] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 81.

[5] Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (Routledge, 2004), 72.

[6] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 40.

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Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:17:45 -0800 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/dec/4/please-dont-call-me-uncanny-hyperlinks-seventeen-g
<![CDATA[Mirrorcity Exhibition]]> https://foursquare.com/therourke/checkin/54464bc5498e748a64ca28d3

@ Hayward Gallery

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Tue, 21 Oct 2014 05:04:21 -0700 https://foursquare.com/therourke/checkin/54464bc5498e748a64ca28d3
<![CDATA[GLTI.CH Breaks, 24 January]]> http://glti.ch/glti-ch-breaks-24-january/

Moody is ready for the next GLTI.CH Breaks happening this Friday (=tomorrow!) 10PM – 12:30AM GMT. Join him and us to celebrate the opening of Tactical Glitches, curated by Nick Briz and Rosa Menkman, at Sudlab with

SAHN+JAMES spinning in from San Francisco (US), followed by DJ WAX ON in from Derby (UK) followed by TRAMSHED in from London (UK) ending the night

We’re excited our original crew is back for this second GLTI.CH Breaks! Working with our kludgy ways they’ll be sending real-time beats and breaks from their various locales to the party-makers and -shakers inhabiting the Sudlab gallery space in Portici, Italy. Can’t corporeally make it to Sudlab? No problemo! Join us online in the GLTI.CH Tinychat room (http://tinychat.com/gltich) wherever you are in the universe!

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Wed, 22 Jan 2014 20:36:14 -0800 http://glti.ch/glti-ch-breaks-24-january/
<![CDATA[Glitch Moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery]]> http://vimeo.com/75025350

This video was taken at Glitch Moment/ums opening event at Furtherfield Gallery (London) on Saturday 8 June 2013. Featuring artists: Alma Alloro, Melissa Barron, Nick Briz, Benjamin Gaulon, José Irion Neto, Antonio Roberts and Ant Scott. The artists in this exhibition appropriate the technological and digital medium in order to make what is known as Glitch Art. These technically, imaginative disruptions include different approaches with the media whether it exploits software or hardware and includes video, sound and glitch textiles. furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/glitch-momentumsCast: FurtherfieldTags:

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Mon, 30 Dec 2013 05:33:04 -0800 http://vimeo.com/75025350
<![CDATA[Portals at CRYSTALLIZE: The Aftermath + interview for BBC World]]> http://glti.ch/portals-at-crystallize-the-aftermath/

We just finished a 3 day marathon we called GLTI.CH Portals, at CRYSTALLIZE exhibition. Part of a 3 day New Media art installation at the 2013 Korea Brand & Entertainment Expo, held at Old Billingsgate, London. Below are photos from the event. You can also listen to a brief interview we did with BBC Radio’s Dan Damon for World Update (listen from about 17mins in). We really want to thank everyone who took part and all those who brought this exhibition together, especially Stephanie Seungmin Kim, Heejin Cho and Hyemi Na for inviting, curating and welcoming us into the Korean/UK collaborative fold. This might very well be the last time GLTI.CH host a Karaoke event. We have news of this soon, but for now, please enjoy the wondrous smiles on all the GLTI.CH Portal participants’ faces.

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Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:25:10 -0800 http://glti.ch/portals-at-crystallize-the-aftermath/
<![CDATA[GLTI.CH Breaks, 24th May]]> http://glti.ch/gltich-breaks-the-1st/

On Friday May 24th we will be turning our back on Karaoke for a special, probably-not-one-off, event: GLTI.CH BREAKS Join us for unexpected beats and breaks in the first ever transglobal experiment to fuse vinyl scratches, Ethernet delays and Dalston skinny jeans! As you can see from our delicious diagram, GLTI.CH Breaks is a collaboration with several adventurous DJs who will mix vinyl LIVE between various cities around the world. Watch and gawp in awe as TramShed, DJing from London, mixes DJ Wax On, in Derby, straight into Sahn, live in LA…

(on saturday we tested some of these ideas out… a bonus very-shakey-video can be found above) In the spirit of time delays, infinite grooves and Skype decay, we will kludge together an energy-fuelled two-hour live DJ set, turning technical breakdowns into reasons to breakdown! We are really excited to be teaming up with curatorial wizards Christina Millare and Dee Sada, as well as a host of other technically minded creative megalomaniacal superstars. Featuring GLTI.CH Breaks from:

TramShed, DJ Wax On, Sahn, and OTHER DJs Yet TBC!!

with live performances, exhibitions and HAPPENINGS from:

The Bohman Brothers, Dog Chocolate, Ewa Justka, New Noveta, Lorah Pierre, Tom White

Enjoy the Breaks LIVE, 8pm – 2am, at Power Lunches (Kingsland Road, Dalston) or join us online on the night at: tinychat.com/gltich Tickets: £5 adv / £6 on the door Advance tickets available here: wegottickets.com/event/220669 - Facebook event invite thingy here: HAPPENING!

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Tue, 14 May 2013 17:28:51 -0700 http://glti.ch/gltich-breaks-the-1st/
<![CDATA[The Enemies project: Camarade IV - Holly Pester & Daniel Rourke]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlA21GaQCz4&feature=youtube_gdata

Held at the rich mix arts centre on February 9th 2013, the fourth in the Camarade series and the first event of the Enemies project (www.weareenemies.com) saw thirteen pairings of British and European poets read original avant garde and literary poetry collaborations for a remarkable evening of contemporary poetic performance.

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Sun, 10 Feb 2013 05:28:54 -0800 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlA21GaQCz4&feature=youtube_gdata
<![CDATA[Superhuman: The artist, the scholar and the zealot « Wellcome Trust Blog]]> http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/superhuman-the-artist-the-scholar-and-the-zealot/

The frontier of science is a wild and lawless place. Like all badlands, it attracts visionaries, charlatans and the dispossessed. Far from the jurisdiction of law enforcers, isolated communities cluster together and thrive in quiet obscurity. No group however, is quite so strange as the bio-hackers.

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Wed, 29 Aug 2012 02:17:00 -0700 http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/superhuman-the-artist-the-scholar-and-the-zealot/
<![CDATA[The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder]]> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/

The New Aesthetic is an art movement obsessed with the otherness of computer vision and information processing. But Ian Bogost asks: why stop at the unfathomability of the computer's experience when there are airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to contemplate?

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Sat, 14 Apr 2012 08:21:55 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-new-aesthetic-needs-to-get-weirder/255838/
<![CDATA[An Essay on the New Aesthetic]]> http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/

The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable.

If aesthetics could be hacked like code, then a beautiful rose, in the beak of a beautiful flamingo, flying in a beautiful sunset, would be 3X-beautiful. It isn’t. It never will be. You can’t make it be. That’s not the way the world works.

A sincere New Aesthetic would be a valiant, comprehensive effort to truly and sincerely engage with machine-generated imagery — not as a freak-show, a metaphor or a stimulus to the imagination — but as it exists. The real deal, down to the scraped-metal chip surface, if necessary.

Artists have used mechanical means of perception for a long time now. One doesn’t have to apologize for this nowadays, in the way Baudelaire used to wring his hands over daguerreotype cameras. That fight’s over. Everybody’s got hardware. People who can’t read have hardware. Every ivory tower we possess is saturated with hardware.

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Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:02:38 -0700 http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/
<![CDATA[How Christian Marclay created “The Clock”]]> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski

“When I first started on this project, I thought it would become a public art piece,” Marclay said. “I thought, What a great thing, to be in a train station waiting for a train and being able to watch a movie. It would inform you what time it was, and at the same time entertain you. But I realized it was impossible—there’s lighting issues, sound issues, you have to hear the public-address system. And Grand Central, for example, closes for a few hours, late at night, when they clean up the place. Then there’s the occasional nudity and swearing. How do you show that at Grand Central? And then you start censoring yourself, and you can’t do it.” But there was a more important reason that the video needed to exert a tyrannical hold in a dark gallery. Shown amid other distractions, it became an ambient object: just another clock.

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Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:30:56 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski
<![CDATA[Alan Moore's Masks: A Face to Face]]> http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/111586

Alan Moore and David Lloyd designed it 30 years ago. The V for Vendetta mask appropriated by Occupy protesters the world over. The Guardian recently asked Alan what he thought about the masks. Now Channel 4 news takes him into Occupy territory to face that face. But who is the true anarchist?

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Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:20:01 -0800 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/111586
<![CDATA[Barbarians on the Thames]]> http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_otbie-british-riots.html

A postmortem of the British riots

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Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:36:18 -0800 http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_otbie-british-riots.html