[-empyre-] Welcome to June on -empyre: Fake News in a Global Climate

[Anna Munster]

Thanks Renata and Tim!

Lindsay and I are pretty interested in asking about what art might do in the global fakescape currently permeating the atmosphere.

Is it the case that (the)media and arts are located in completely different spaces and are responding with totally different tactics or strategies in the wake of ‘post-truth’ politics? 
It seems as though so much old media is caught up within an epistemological chasm, flung back and forth between being a pack of liars and defending the ‘facts’. Being duly investigative. 
The social media scape, on the other hand, feeds itself on more and more elaborate stoushes around ‘lies’, rumour and ironic irony…

What powers might art hold to do something different? Isn’t art built upon the fake, upon reflexivity about its own performativity: The Yes Men, Pierre Huyghe,AUDINT (http://audint.net/n2017/deadrecordoffice/), The Museum of Jurassic Technology….all deploy the fake in another spacetime than in opposition to the ‘real’ or the ‘true’…..

We are about to run an event: FAKE NEWS from the Art and Politics Bureau’ as Renate mentioned…..we’ll let you know what we have to ‘report’ (already a problem and questioned by new and experimental forms of documentary)…

cheers Anna

Professor Anna Munster
UNSW Art and Design.
Sydney, Australia