Re: [-empyre-] 'Bare LIfe' -- a lyrical and even ecstatic dimension

["Conor McGarrigle" <conormcgarrigle@gmail.com>]

Hi Christina and all


> Football mania provides an interesting elision into the conditions of
> 'bare life' and mass ectasy and how this intercalates with the 'state
> of exception,' don't you think?  Seems like that's your (and
> Aliette's -- as another football commentator this week from Paris)
> implication.

I see football, or more precisely the act of watching football, as an
interesting lead into connecting much new media - net art especially -
to Agemben's concept of bare life in it's different forms. Football is
undoubtedly a cultural product, a multi-million euro business vital to
the profits of sportwear manufacturers and media empires, a top down
industry with the consumer at the bottom. A consumer whose only role
is to consume in the pre-approved manner?

I rather see watching football as more of a tactical activity as
described by Michel de Certeau in which the audience appropriate the
received space of the game and use it in a way that is meaningful to
them, often totally foreign to the intent of the producers. Rather
than this being a contemporary roman games or opium of the people
designed to take the minds of the masses off the state of exception I
see as a product of this very state and watching football as one of
the many spaces that have been appropriated by the excluded and the
powerless. Tactics which are at the heart of so much new media art
today including my own work. I don't think it's an accident that the
real Luther Blisset was a footballer.

One of the aspects of the state of exception is the increasingly
panoptic society we live in . Agamben refuses to travel to the US
because he will not subject himself to the retinal scanning and
fingerprinting required to enter the country because he feels that
this would render him to a state of bare life. It was revealed
recently that the Pentagon are funding research to data mine social
networking spaces like myspace and connect this with their other
datasources. When we look at the detail freely available in Google
earth we can only imagine what level of detail is availably for
military or security use add to this the unstoppable march of
surveillance cameras and this is only what we know about. We are now
all constantly exposed and, I feel, powerless to stop or reverse these
trends how do we deal with it , how can we make art about it?

Tactical new media exposing the workings of the systems, using the
tools in subversive ways and intervening, often in small seemingly
inconsequential ways which have a cumulative effect, shows the way.
Think of plagiarist's SVEN, recently mentioned by Michelle, or
Michellt Terans Life a User's manual where she hacks into wireless
surveillance camera feeds using off the shelf gear or my own Spook...
which used unprotected server logs as a datasource or Google Bono
which has as it's raw material Dublin's traffic cams used in a way
that the city fathers would never have imagined. In de Certeaus work
he proposes that it is this tactical usage where "the imposed
knowledge and symbolisms become objects manipulated by practioners who
have not produced them" is the way in which it is possible to live in
intolerable situations and the way in which the weak and the powerless
can appropriate  a self made power which can't be controlled by the
powerful. In is this space that I see new media art being effective
and it opens new possibilities of making art.

all the best


Conor