Re: <nettime> Has net-art lost political significance?

Hi everyone,

I really appreciate all the replies both on and off the list.

I hadn't made a connection between this post and the very popular discussion of net-time and I’m very interested to hear that Transmediale is exploring the persistence of networks.

One of the most inspiring books I've read in the past few years was Anna Tsing's A Mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. It might seem odd that an anthropological text on supply chains and Matsutake mushrooms changed how I thought about the politics of networks, but the book also explores the limits and possibilities of political agency from a position of ecological ruin, hopelessness and precarity. A brilliant chapter ‘some problems with scale’ also helped me to articulate criticisms I had of a lot of peer-to-peer and network activist projects. I’m also re-reading some work from people like the late Mark Fisher and Rebecca Solnit on politics and hope.

A few things have come up in conversations over the past few weeks (I’ve mostly been talking to and emailing people instead of writing).

1. There also seems to be a shift towards a feminist politics of networks. Maybe I’m using the term ‘feminist’ incorrectly here because I don’t mean work that’s particularly concerned with identity politics. But if we say that people like Butler and Haraway and Barad disrupt binary thinking around gender and materiality, this kind of transdisciplinary, non-binary thinking coupled with an ethics of care (i.e. someone like Maria Puig de la BellaCasa) provides us with a set of tools for thinking through new kinds of resistance as well as new ways of relating to ourselves with and through networked communications infrastructure. There seems to be more of an emphasis on localized and situated interventions for example rather than things that scale. There seems to be a greater emphasis on pedagogical practices than on technical implementation. If anything is starting to emerge as a kind of pattern for me, this is it. I think that’s also reflected in the sensibilities of projects like Platform Cooperativism and the Decode Project.

2. Techniques that can be identified as part of first and second wave ‘tactical media’ such as reverse-engineering/ circuit bending/ hacking; the exploit; commoning/DIY; obfuscation; visualization/mapping; and speculative imagining are still used and are still necessary. And I think some of these, particularly reverse-engineering and obfuscation, seem to be particularly significant in the context of platforms. Not to mention being able to imagine alternatives in the face of overwhelming odds.

These are some of my own thoughts coming out of returning to the book I’m writing on the politics of wireless networks and the EM spectrum, from students while teaching an undergraduate elective on network politics and art with undergraduate students in NCAD and recent conversations mostly over networks with Rosa Menkman, Geert Lovink, Jussi Parikka, Surya Mattu, Patrick Bresnihan, Brian Holmes, Nate Tkacz, Nora O Murchu and Sarah Grant, the OMG collective in Dublin and C-Node (Paul O’Brien) in the past few weeks.

On Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 3:05 PM Minka Stoyanova <theartist@minkaart.net> wrote:

Hello Rachel,

I love your questions. Personally, I just submitted my PhD thesis which had some similar research goals. While I love the construct of "the network" and "the exploit" -- I feel they are dated/need revision in today's landscape of platform politics. In addition I think the flat hierarchy of the network is a bit utopian and doesn't recognize the power of some individuals in the overall structure. Moreover, I feel the discourse around tactical works needs to be expanded to include works that engage technology (broadly) in a critical way as, for me, technology and the internet are (at this point) part of a single continuum. The idea that we can talk about work 'on the web' singularly and separate from work that is about the web, that is of the web, or that is simply of our current techno-social condition is stifling, I believe.

I think you can apply whatever theoretical model you want; the discourse (as your research question recognizes) is ripe for new frameworks. Personally, I used my own kind of cyborg theory (a blend of Heidegger, McLuhan, Latour, Haraway, Bratton, and Terranova... among others) to discuss these types of works in terms of challenging our relationship to technology as both a global system we are embedded in and distributed across and as something which has embedded itself in us. Maybe that will help you with your approach.

Certainly, there are artists making work that is interesting, important, and political in this landscape. Many are mentioned in other responses. Goodness, what the alt-right did was straight out of the handbook of Tactical Media, very effective, and not not art -- although it might terrify some of us. That has been discussed here, in fact -- and I was again discussing it last week at a conference.

~Minka

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 11:38 AM <voyd@voyd.com> wrote:

So interesting.
I also find this so interesting because in the light of fakeness, Tactical Media is harder, in the sense of the intervention/provocation to response that was done with RTMark/YesMen back in the time I was active. I think that the new Washington Post, after the Times and NY Post ones that were done in the late 2000's, was powerful because I heard about it in the UAE.

However, in the Eastern hemisphere, I have been working with AR as a "local" discourse (meaning that anyone can get the app, but the message is pretty limited to them), as well as working with artists in Kazakhstan about messages AR as tactical media, such as overlaying messages over works in the National Mueum (based on the Manifest.AR We AR MoMA intervention I was part of around 2010) and the "Modernization of Consciousness" (Ruhani Zhangru) posters in 2018. These are some interestign ways in which one can laterally engage networks for critical discourse.

In addition, I am working with David Guillo with his independent web router galleries as a sort of TAZ in regions that employ firewalls and net.filtering. This follows from my setting up occupy.here routers as wifi "islands" for collaboration without using VPN, and therefore staying technically within local regulations.
While not so much "Tactical" media, I consider that in the era of increasing firewalling, and in the case of threatened net.separation in Russia and Iran, I feel hang autonomous server art is a critical space for exploration of these topics as well.

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 15:28:58 -0700, Molly Hankwitz wrote:

Hi Rachel,

snip -

I’m currently writing about various tactical and activist practices in the wireless space, including artistic interventions, software-defined radio communities who are reverse-engineering, hacking, sniffing and jamming signals, communities and activists who are building communal Wi-Fi and cellular networks and artists making work in or about the politics of the wireless spectrum – who owns it, how it’s controlled and so on

snip

Great. So needed. I wrote a dissertation on WiFi practices - a bit earlier history than what you are looking for. I write about “warchalking” and other kinds of social media based information spaces, hacks. From that experience I’d bet you will be best off in the arts. If there is writing being done it would be from groups like the then - headman - Knowbotics Research, etc. But the best project - utilizing mobile tools and being both tactical and poetry and human rights - Transborder Tool b.a.n.g. Lab. Ricardo Dominguez’s and Brett Stalbaum from virtual sit-in days behind it as well as Micha Cardenas. We programmed this into our project - City Centered: Locative Media and Wireless Festival - 2010. I think TBT is having a re-release. (Smile)

Molly

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 3:40 AM Rachel O' Dwyer <rachel.odwyer@gmail.com> wrote:

What characterises media art interventions in the context of ‘surveillance capitalism’, platforms and the gig economy? Are these practices still meaningful or, as F.A.T. Lab claimed in 2015, have they lost political significance in the face of global platforms?

Can we still speak about ‘tactical media’ or ‘the exploit’, and if not is this because

a) network activism has transformed so that these older descriptions no longer accurately describe net art and ‘hacktivist’ practices, or

b) these art practices have stayed much the same, but they are no longer effective in the current political and economic context?

I’m wondering if anyone knows of any writing that attempts to theorise/frame media art activist work post 2012? Perhaps to speak about it as a set of practices discrete from theories of ‘tactical media’ or ‘the exploit’ that go before? Perhaps something on post-internet art and activism?

Or is it a case of looking at writing about activism in the face of defeat and what seems like a hopeless cause?

If you've read or written anything that you think might be interesting I'd love to hear about it,

Best,

Rachel

A bit more detail about why I'm asking this question:

I’m currently writing about various tactical and activist practices in the wireless space, including artistic interventions, software-defined radio communities who are reverse-engineering, hacking, sniffing and jamming signals, communities and activists who are building communal Wi-Fi and cellular networks and artists making work in or about the politics of the wireless spectrum – who owns it, how it’s controlled and so on.

But I’m feeling a bit paralysed.

I love these works; I love their inventive materiality and the ways that they exploit and reverse-engineer existing systems, but I don’t know what claims I can make for their political impact. And yet I feel that this work is still very worthwhile.

--

http://www.rachelodwyer.com/

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