[-empyre-] Process as Paradigm - response to Baruch (susanne jaschko)

[b gottlieb]

>
> Thank you for your thoughtful response, Susanne,
>
>
>> Though I would like to see it another way, and please, convince me, I take
>> the position that all digital art is political
>
> http://gratfortech.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-new-media-is-political.html
>
> actually, I am not quite fully ready to argue the point yet, I believe that
>> the corporate or industrial 'state of the art' has long since colonized the
>> field of experience that digital artists claim for themselves, rendering the
>> most 'advanced' young digital practitioners, active, voluntary R&D agents
>> for the next wave of technological production.
>
>
>> We can see this with how so many fragile, courageous, experimental,
>> well.-meaning Web Art 1.0 projects became prototype corporate Web 2.0 cash
>> cow applications.  The whole critical approach some of us cherished, needed,
>> cheered at nettime, extra-academic, and anarchistic, has been absorbed and
>> denatured by the 'social web'.
>
>
>> It is not really possible to be extra-institutional with digital art
>> because the equipment requires institutional frameworks to make it run.  I
>> think the work from the show "still living" eloquently describes the
>> distance we have from the world of realthings which goes on beyond our
>> screens.
>
>
>> But, yes, I was provoked by Lucas' seeming willingness to grapple with
>> some serious shit in this discussion. I wanted to say, that there is not
>> much place for serious shit in an art exhibition.  Though I think the work
>> they are doing at Waag, comes closer.  But then, they are plainly working in
>> hybrid art-design-institutional forms, not in 'art-pour-l'art'.
>
>
>> As you said it, Susanne,  politics takes place in another realm, a
>> terribly dreary place full of vested interests and  meetings with
>> bureaucrats and officials, not the favourite environment for most, certainly
>> not most  artists.   But even if Hans (as you mentioned) says he is not
>> interested in the political impact of his work, though his work is often
>> quite explicitly political,  I interpret his statement more as a concession
>> that most ambitions to create political change with an art work will be
>> largely vanity. The artspace is contingent on hegemonies which, unless
>> demystified, compromise any strong politics which might take place in the
>> work.
>
>
>> I find it interesting how many of the exhibits in this show are informed
>> with techno-nostalgia or glorifications of decay. As I said in my essay for
>> the catalogue, I think this is a gentle process of mourning the obsolescence
>> of our bodies at the dawn of nano-technology.
>
>
>> But this is  problematic, techno-nostalgia implies that old or obsolete
>> technology, in its monstrous cuteness (or cute monstrosity), is somehow
>> harmless.  This is an error I see in the steam-punk aesthetics of Andrew
>> Harwood's otherwise well-meaning Memorial. I know that Andrew works
>> intensively with some communities directly affected by the  tragedy in the
>> Congo, but I think that art work, rather than draw serious attention to an
>> issue, aestheticises and confuses the issue.  That kind of work needs to be
>> more conscious of the danger of becoming a palliative for the curators,
>> festival organizers and visitors to feel they have now sufficiently  engaged
>> with a difficult aspect of the techno-utopia they otherwise want to be
>> deluded about.
>
>
>> Also I think the romantic notion of benevolent punks and hackers taking
>> over the techno-ruins of our age (assuming a wholesale global collapse) and
>> innovating small-scale anarcho-utopias of sharing is a delusion. And any
>> other romanticism futurologist nightmare scenario, is more like to be a
>> living nightmare, and not a scenario.
>
>
>> The Yes Men, on the other hand, I think are a miracle. Would you call it
>> processual art?  It is more like shock theatre for the new media age. And in
>> that sense, I have to think about it again.
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> http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
>
>
>> Susanne, are transcripts/recordings from "positions in flux" available?
>
>
>> I agree that these recently emerging forms of expression you mention raise
>> so many interesting questions about where we are and where we are going,
>> and, especially, who 'we' are (if there is any meaning to the pronoun
>> anymore), and who (or what) do 'we' want to become, and is there enough room
>> for 'us' all on the planet, and, if not, how do 'we' resolve this?  In the
>> wealthy countries 'we' have a buffer from the urgency of these sorts of
>> questions, but 'we' will be forced to face them.  Processual art may help
>> bring 'us' to face such questions.  How long 'we' will choose to engage with
>> them is an ethical matter.
>
>
>>
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