[-empyre-] Horit Herman Peled : Participatory Art

[Timothy Murray]

The digital revolution is not a revolution 
anymore. Its revolutionary potential has long 
been assimilated into the Capitalist form and 
practice, as was that of the mechanical 
revolution before it. Referring to the 
relationship between workers and Capital in the 
postindustrial era, 
Slavoj<http://nosubject.com/Slavoj_%c5%BDI%25/C5BEek:Articles> 
Zizek has claimed that "Š it is not workers who 
are in excess, but the Capital itself" 
(<http://www.lacan.com/zizbarabajal.html>http://www.lacan.com/zizbarabajal.html). 
In the last two years, history gazes in 
compliance and boredom at the crisis that has 
struck the global village, triumphing Capital 
over workers/humans and other living beings. Yes, 
the digital revolution did hold on its animated 
wings a new hope for the empowerment of the 
individual artist, as well as the multitudes, 
through the reinstituting of autonomy. A 
perpetuum mobile utopia was partially realized 
through the abundance of tools and the new 
perspectives on time and space. However, in 
"reality," utopia was interwoven into the 
economic surface, enhanced by digital 
technological engines sailing into imaginative 
terrains painted with Capital excess.

The new, detached brave world assembled openings 
loaded with opportunities. However, it needed a 
discourse to accompany the new era. The art 
field, among others, satisfied that need, in part 
through the endeavor of Participatory Art, which 
allowed for the fusion of body/mind/place/trace, 
expanding the horizons of the art works. The 
critical dimension of Participatory Art could be, 
and partially was, added to it through 
digitality, which narrated its politics. It is 
there where a shift could transpire in the 
relationship between humans\nature and Capital. 
The Critical curved a trajectory from Hegel's 
assertion of the end of art to Benjamin's idea of 
the change in the basis of the art object, from 
the commercial to the political. However, 
contradictions still exist on the digital 
artistic plane encapsulating the 
human/nature/Capital symbiosis.

Digitalism facilitated the capabilities for 
blending place, body and the virtual. Critical 
place. It is here that the emancipatory potential 
of engaged artistic activity lies.

participatory art demands that these facilities 
be employed in specific places where the homo 
sacer dwells. Participatory performance in these 
places follows the traces - signs absence, 
anchored of the absence of presence. Emerging 
from the participatory art-in-situ tradition, 
through the virtual critical participatory art 
becomes the presence of the in a

Horit Herman Peled is an artist and theorist, 
teaches new media and theory at the Art Institute 
at Oranim College in Israel. Exhibited at the 
Venice Biennale 2003, The Utopia Station Lab in 
Martha Rosler's Trojan Horse.

<http://www.performanceparadigm.net/category/journal/issue-3/>http://www.performanceparadigm.net/category/journal/issue-3/

<http://www.horit.com/>http://www.horit.com


-- 

Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University