Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is co-Director of Thing (thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists.
A conversation between the Electronic Disturbance Theater & Ian Alan Paul
Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center
مركز خليل السكاكيني الثقافي
Wednesday, March 22nd, 6:30pm
Khalil Sakakini Str. Al Masyoon, Ramallah, Palestine
Wednesday, March 22nd, 6:30pm
Brett Stalbaum is an artist and research theorist specializing in information
theory, database, and software development. A serial collaborator, he
was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998, for
which he co-developed software called FloodNet (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html),
which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the
websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as
the Pentagon. As Forbes Magazine put it "Perhaps the first electronic
attack against a target on American soil was the result of an art
project." For EDT, this was all learned behavior taught by the example
of the Zapatistas. Stalbaum has been part of many other individual and
collaborative projects, and has published widely on digital art, its
context and aesthetics, and location aware media. He is a past editor
of Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE digital media lab.
A collective of five artists dedicated to exploring the intersections
between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory.
This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects. Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool's functioning, is discussed in a context of Inter-American Transcendentalism.
ReadTHE 30TH CONFERENCE OF THE DISRUPTION NETWORK LAB
KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN - BERLIN & STREAMING
[ Archived streaming videos at: https://www.disruptionlab.org/artivism#video ]
How can art and activism be combined to tackle burning social issues, surveillance, unethical corporations and corrupt governments?
A programme of panels, workshops, and artistic productions curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
Ten years ago, there were few online activists and they believed that "cyberspace" was all theirs, a territory from which to emerge anywhere, outflanking the lumbering second-wave dinosaurs responsible for the Cold War and its successor, the McWorld. In the future that actually unfolded, the dinosaurs learned to boot up computers, connect to the Internet and post Web pages, or pay someone to do all this for them. What was a poor online activist to do? Even the son of Slobodan Milosevic has a Web site, to promote his Belgrade dance club.
It's time to create the pop stars of activism,
the idoru of communication guerrilla,
it's time to threaten and charm the
masses by the ghosts coming from the
net, to play the myth against the myth,
to be more nihilist than infoteinment!
- etoy -
A collaborative, activist and conceptual art work of the net
March 17th, 2005
How did it come to this?
Only a perverse authoritarian logic can explain how Critical Art
Ensemble (CAE) can at one moment be creating the project "Free Range
Grain" for the Risk exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt,
reconfiguring it for The Interventionists exhibition at Mass MoCA in a
second moment, and then suddenly have a CAE member in FBI detention.
The U.S. Justice Department has accused us of such shocking crimes as
bioterrorism, health and safety violations, mail fraud, wire fraud, and
even murder. Now, as we retool "Free Range Grain" for the Risk
exhibition at the Glasgow Center for Contemporary Art, the surreal
farce of our legal nightmare continues unabated.
What counts in the long run is the "use" one makes of a theory....We
must start from existing practices in order to retrace the fundamental
flaws.
--Felix Guattari, "Why Marx and Freud No Longer Disturb Anyone"
In 1994, when Critical Art Ensemble first introduced the idea and a
possible model of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as another option
for digital resistance, the collective had no way of knowing what
elements would be the most practical, nor did it know what elements
would require additional explanation. After nearly five years of field
testing of ECD by various groups and individuals, its information gaps
have become a little more obvious and can finally be addressed.
One of the biggest promises of the Internet was the transformation of political activism. No longer would change come about solely through the actions of large organizations, claimed the Web's early enthusiasts. Now, they claimed, individuals could rouse the concern of their fellow citizens for a particular cause through Web sites, e-mail, and online petitions. Those who normally shunned demonstrations and limited their participation in the public sphere could be contacted personally in their e-mail box, and all that would be necessary for them to do to show their support would be to click a button or fill in a field. Soon, pundits predicted, there would be a revolution in grassroots participation in the political process.
ReadThe CAE Defense Fund was created in 2005 as a mechanism to raise funds
for legal bills incurred by Dr. Steven Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell in
what its members argued was a politically motivated attack by the
Department of Justice - one which threatened the constitutional and
fundamental rights not only of the two defendants, but also of
everyone, due to legal precedents that would have been set by an
unfavorable outcome.
In response, thousands of people worldwide organized demonstrations and
raised money for the two men's legal defense through fundraisers and a
variety of other grassroots efforts.
www.caedefensefund.org
They wanted the Germs; they got 'em. - Darby Crash
The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has
always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse
needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and
the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the
9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange
across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.
Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.
There is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek
experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where,
taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human
experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184).
The need for net criticism certainly is a matter of overwhelming urgency. While a number of critics have approached the new world of computerized communications with a healthy amount of skepticism, their message has been lost in the noise and spectacle of corporate hype-the unstoppable tidal wave of seduction has enveloped so many in its dynamic utopian beauty that little time for careful reflection is left. Indeed, a glimpse of a possibility for a better future may be contained in the new techno-apparatus, and perhaps it is best to acknowledge these possibilities here in the beginning, since Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) has no desire to take the position of the neoluddites who believe that the techno-apparatus should be rejected outright, if not destroyed. To be sure, computerized communications offer the possibility for the enhanced storage, retrieval, and exchange of information for those who have access to the necessary hardware, software, and technical skills. In turn, this increases the possibility for greater access to vital information, faster exchange of information, enhanced distribution of information, and cross cultural artistic and critical collaborations. The potential humanitarian benefits of electronic systems are undeniable; however, CAE questions whether the electronic apparatus is being used for these purposes in the representative case, much as we question the political policies which guide the net's development and accessibility.
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