The Artists Network, The Data Body, And The Social Body
Channel: Our Networks
Date: 2018-09-29

This talk begins from a seemingly simple cultural historical premise: that the Net Art/ Anti-Globalism movement theories of data-bodies, new forms of civil disobedience, and the performative matrix of artist networks between virtual and real spaces were formed under pre-digital conditions and artistic practices based in the intermedia movement. More importantly, I argue that pre-digital practices of the artist communications infrastructure as both network and counterinstitution-- derived from media revolutions of the underground press, conceptual and process art practices of social sculpture, and working class progressivist artist workers movements of the 20th century-- allowed for counterhegemonic deterritorializations and reterritorializations of emergent media networks and resources. These intermedia cultural movements prioritized hybrid ontologies and adapted tactically from the pre-digital to digital cusp through media ecologies of electronic globalization characterizing neoliberal mobility and modularity. I recommend revisiting these early data-body organizational structures to combat the de-and-reterritorializing threats of multinational, corporate modularity to the 21st century city as data-body, doing so through rapid, targeted changes to that civic data-body via tactical media interventions in the social body. As opposed to particular conceptions of tactical media as performance art based media activism, I look to tether the mediated discursivity of its social practice art to actions that are both cultural and micropolitical: locational and geared towards alternative economies and broader social movements.

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