Craig Saper, "Intimate Bureaucracies (as FluxHouseMusic by dj readies)"
The FluxHouse project functioned like a DIY development corporation, but with cooperative and social capitalists motivations. Maciunas referred to it as entrepreneurial communism, but now the phrase social entrepreneurs describes similar projects like Kiva or Kickstarter. The apparent oxymoron, intimate bureaucracies, is a set of strategically subversive maneuvers and also the very basis for the new productive mythology surrounding the World Wide Web. Electronic networks combine a bureaucracy with its codes, passwords, links, and so on with niche marketing, intimate personal contacts, and the like, creating a hybrid situation or performance. ItÕs a mix of cold impersonal systems and intimate social connections; it scales up whispering down the lane games. The earlier projects of Anna Freud Banana, Guy Bleus (whose canceling stamps appear in this manifesto), Randall Packer, Geof Huth, and many others all used the trappings of bureaucracies, like canceling stamps, systems of organizing information, and alternative publication networks, to create similar hybrid performances. The Madison, Wisconsin artists mIEKAL aND & Lyx Ish even started a Dreamtime Village (www.dreamtimevillage.org). It is not merely business or governmental performance masquerading as performance art. It is not even performance art mocking business and government procedures, but the emergence of an alternative politics. Intimate bureaucracies may exist on a different scale than the large systems that determine ideologies. One view of the conflict involving the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) might suggest a conflict against the large-ideological fossil fuel-burning car (and the socio-political industry) as well as the rapid transport systemÕs corollaries in the instant flows of capital among investment banks. The endless rapid cartel system (pun intended) involves a series of objectionable results, including the flows of capital away from slowly declining red-lined areas. In response to the OWS protests, the society of the instant produces 24/7 news flashes, rapid summaries and counter-arguments, all clamoring for an instantly available definitive set of "demands" or a "program." The system does not merely demand the attention of the viewers as in the society of the spectacle, but now also demands instant response. OWS's most profound politics may have less to do with the injustices of the current tax codes, wealth disparity, or even, economic collapse, and more to do with its systems and practices of organization and communication. Social organization may involve finding your own groove, learning to spin, and following a niche cultural rhythm. .
Manfred Mohr, Artist
I will talk about my journey from abstract expressionism to a rational artistic expression And the time I needed to understand and learn what I wanted to do as an artist in this uncharted field. With visual examples, I will go step by step through my artistic developments of 40 years. I will show how I got to develop an algorithmic thinking and how I slowly proceeded into n-dimensional complexity to extract new visual inventions. I got fascinated by the idea of writing down exactly what one wanted to do before doing it, and then programming it. Parallel to this, I will talk about the difficulties, which today nobody can imagine, to access a computer in the 60's and 70's or simply to learn a programming language. Programming was not taught yet and text books hardly existed. All these things are now basic and part of every day life. I will talk about the resistance and aggressiveness of the general public to my work or for that matter to any computer generated art work, which was seen in those days as works possessed by the devil created with military equipment and out to destroy art. At some point in the early 70's, I was even physically attacked because of that anger. I will conclude with short computer animations of my work from 2000-2011 of different dimensional complexities.
Christiane Paul, Feedback: New Media Art Histories
Using examples from the exhibition Feedback (LABoral, Gijon, Spain, 2007; curated by Christiane Paul and Jemima Rellie with Charlie Gere) as a starting point, the talk outlines several strands of digital practices and their art-historical lineage, with a focus on art that sets up open systems or networked connections. On the one hand, the concept of feedbackÑwhich emerged from cybernetics and its systems of control and communicationÑliterally captures qualities of art that responds to various forms of input and is affected again by the response. On the other hand, the title refers to the approach of taking a look back at art-historical predecessors of art using digital technologies as a medium and exploring their legacies the ways in which the ideas addressed in these earlier works have moved forward in contemporary artistic practice. The talk will also explore the process of 'versioning' that networked art has undergone in moving from its 1.0 to 2.0 release from the early 1990s through the 2000s. Artistic practice on the net has both helped to initiate and responded to the move from the 1.0 to 2.0 version of networked environments and their respective articulation of data spaces, identity, and collective production.
McKenzie Wark, Nettime and the Rise of Netcritique (1995-2000)
Nettime.org was a curious moment in the history of digital culture. It was Eurocentric rather than American. It blended interests in art, theory, politics and tech. At least two things emerged out of it. On the one hand, it was a space for the formulation of the principles of netcritique. All the old media theories were rehearsed and discarded. What emerged was certainly no consensus but a common set of reference points, a language, the beginnings of a discourse that would later be codified by the art world and academia as net.art and new media theory. But nettime was also a practice. It was a curious kind of gift economy, a peer-to-peer network before there was any such name for it. Perhaps it is time to revisit nettime, and begin the archaeology of this curious moment in digital culture's avant gardes.
Ricardo Dominguez, University of California San Diego
Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT) who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. EDT 2.0's recent project with artists Brett Stabaum, Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll and Elle Mehrman, the *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the winner of "Transnational Communities Award" (2008), this award was funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico - U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), also funded by CALIT2 and two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. *Transborder Immigrant Tool* was exhibited at 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2010), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2011), Re.Play LA (2012). TBT was also under investigation by the U.S. Congress in 2009/10, and was also reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially "dissolved" the U.S. border with its poetry (http://bang.calit2.net/xborder). The *particle group* (artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, and Ricardo Dominguez) research the relation between nano-capitalism(s), nano-toxicology, and nano-poetics. Their work has been presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, and FILE festivals in Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), NYC (2010/11), and their next project ÒNa(no)Ó will be presented at SOMA, Mexico (2012). Ricardo is an Associate Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 (http://bang.calit2.net).
Brad Troemel, New York University
Raise your hand if you're not here. How did art go from the mimicry of Hollywood to sincerely endorsing its celebrity culture? What creative potentials exist for anonymous artistic production and how may the internet aid or inhibit these possibilities? What is the effect of image aggregators' imposed anonymity on art? What creative uses of anonymity are currently being employed in the shadow of increased surveillance? Brad Troemel will address the resistance to, use of, and potential for digital anonymity in the art world.