<div dir="ltr">On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 7:25 PM Renate Ferro <<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu">rferro@cornell.edu</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
What I am trying to wrap my head around today relates to the collapse of the virtual networks of social media highway into networks of physical political engagement, resistance, and protest in the streets... Where do we go from here individually and collectively? How does art help to engage social media users to understand the underpinnings? What may have negative impacts? Or positive ones? What can we learn from comparisons?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>These are great questions. Given that in 2016, Facebook's own investigation concluded that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools," I think we are talking about a political question that requires the exercise of existing laws, and more likely, new legislation. However that's not artists' work.</div><div><br></div><div>The art presented here is really compelling, not so much for the obfuscating or other blocking and jamming effects it may carry out, but more, because of its capacities to teach the viewers/users what happens when they engage with social media. This learning can be quite focused and technical, but it's also likely to be broad and conceptual. In the wake of Shoshana Zuboff's writing, it now extends to the analysis of surveillance capitalism, which is authoritative, mainstream, and of crucial importance in terms of a possible legislative response. Offering an embodied experience that connects to such wider discourses is definitely within the remit of art. One can wonder, though, about the continued highlighting of obfuscation, jamming and evasion. Can individual freedom really solve social problems? What kind of message are we trying to send?</div><div><br></div><div>In the past, tactical media artists used "any media necessary" to fight illegitimate power. Now we see that *some media* promote radicalization and polarization, on the right for sure, leading straight into the streets, with weapons locked and loaded. How about on the left? How to deal artistically with a strategy of deliberate polarization? How to produce critical strategies that do not further polarize the public space, reducing it to a friend-enemy clash?<br></div><div><br></div><div>No doubt all of the projects presented deal in some way with small-group formation and notions of the public sphere, or perhaps counter-public spheres. We know that small groups can withdraw from the media sphere, and they can produce their own ideology too: the left is good at this. How not to collapse into your own filter bubble? How to protectively withdraw from manipulative social media and yet remain engaged with the public sphere that it configures? After all, politics is now made public through Twitter. You can't wish it away.</div><div><br></div><div>In short, I think a new generation of tactical media artists should probably concentrate on its affective and psychological effects on individuals, and through them, on society. To do this they will have to deal, not only with technical issues of tracking and identification, but also with philosophical issues such as the relation between private emotion and the public sphere of representation. Do I go into the streets because I'm fighting mad? Do we want to smash the system? Do I know where my feelings have come from? How do we figure out - or create - what we really stand for, when so many forces struggle to answer that question for us, over so many different media?</div><div><br></div><div>I said a new generation of tactical media practitioners will have to take up these questions: but I bet the present generation already has. Looking forward to some of their answers.</div><div><br></div><div>all the best, Brian<br></div></div></div>