nettime Review of Gregory Sholette's Dark Matter
Dark Matter by Gregory Sholette: Mass Artistic Resistance to the Neo-Liberalization of Everyday Life By Molly Hankwitz Finally, a history of collective precarity from a politicized artist. Author/writer, Gregory Sholette, in the final paragraph of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, at last clarifies the frequently cited metaphor of ?zombies? and enormous digital casts, which likes of Annalee Newitz? have been preoccupied with in terms of popular culture and most noticeably, the big budget extravaganza digital films of recent decades. He writes: *We go on picking the rags, but every now and again, this other social [non] productivity appears to mobilize its own redundancy, seems to acknowledge that it is indeed just so much surplus---talent, labor, subjectivity, even sheer physical-genetic materiality?and in so doing frees itself from even attempting to be usefully productive for capitalism?, though all the while identifying itself with a far larger ocean of ?dark matter?, that ungainly surfeit of seemingly useless actors and activity that the market views as waste, or perhaps at best as a raw, interchangeable resource for biometric information and crowd sourcing. The archive has split open. We are its dead capital. It is the dawn of the dead. * This blatant appeal to the use-value of our necrophilia, artistic waste, the products of our labor and time, runs throughout an historical text, alternately conscious of its own limitations and brilliantly pervasive in its political critique and arts research. Sholette devotes himself to describing the animation of a diverse, selection of contemporary artists collectives and collective projects, American, European, South American, and ?other?, for whom relationships as cultural workers to the neo-liberal art world in recent decades of the 21st century, has been a central concern. Among this history are crisp critical frameworks for understanding the art and its positioning against what he calls ?enterprise culture? or the current era of marked precarity in which artists are force to live, which is also marked by ?enforced creativity? imposed on all forms of labor. Sholette, a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000)[a collective I had some engagement with in 1989[ is as engaged a political critic as he is an artist/activist. ?Dark Matter? is a considerable art and activist history contributing an elegant read to what is already in print, while paying homage to such luminaries as Lucy Lippard and Martha Rosler, lurching forward afresh in its sharp critique of the neo-liberalization of daily life, and celebrating collective action in the ?art world.? Much published history around activist art falls into two distinct camps, books on specific ?identity politics? art from feminists, gays, latino, ?etcetera? artists---David Roman?s ?Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS?, for instance, ?Street Art San Francisco-Missioin Muralismo*?*, by Annice Jacoby, for another; and movement-oriented art books highlighting one ?outsider? art form --graffiti, stencil art, Occupy art, for instance, which bracket a specific local/global analysis, or art, comix, photography, music and poetry ?output? for a single movement. Then there are publications which recuperate *material* archives: posters, papers, ?zines, and self-made/artists?publications from collectives and groups, as political art history. George Kaplan?s newly edited book, *Power to the People!* Is one recent manifestation of this catalog type. Both publishing directions offer significant breadth of understanding to radical culture and political art. Understanding. What Sholette?s book has to offer as a companion to these kinds of texts, is his politics, which looks at explicitally at collectivized art in the ?enterprise culture??framing this within in discourse on surplus labor and ?the invisible mass?--and privileging the radical economy behind interventionist works as the basis of an era of art making outside the mainstream. In other words, this book is about radical art now; not recuperated art, and its about strains of art practice which would elsewise go unnoticed, particularly in the broad, totality of culture on which he writes. On one level Dark Matter is a critique of the ?clipping out? of particular activist art, for curatorial shows, an act that removes the work from its labor, and reduces it to a mere ?institutional? appropriation. His account of ?counter-institutional? interventions as political art production is by contrast a finely tuned account. Sholette makes the sophisticated argument that precarity, while not desired, is its own best motivator; that useless labor, cast out and invisiblized as a byproduct of neoliberal capital, develops its own economy from which to persist, linking methods in making art as social production to itself as product of its
Re: nettime Aesthetics of Dispersed Attention: Interview
Geert, thanks for sharing news of Petra Loeffler's forthcoming book with us. Her argument against the theoretical assumption that distraction or dispersion of attention is a negative per se is well taken. In Geert's introduction: Within this worrying spread of postmodern deceases, who would talk about the healing effects of daydreaming? Petra Loeffler does, and she refers to Michel de Montaigne, who, already many centuries ago, recommended diversion as a comfort against suffering of the souls. Why can't we acknowledge the distribution of attention as an art form, a gift, in fact a high skill? I do have trouble with the terms such as distraction and dispersed attention that don't seem to be logically equivalent. Also, distraction is opposed to widely differing concepts other than concentration in the course of the interview. Loeffler's conclusion of the interview anticipates intensified distraction (a contradiction in terms) with revolutionary potential akin to art: PL: I was surprised reading in Dialectics of Enlightment that, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, a total excess of distraction comes, in its extremity, close to art. This thought, it occurs to me, resonates Siegfried Kracauer's utopia of distraction of the 1920s dealing with modern mass media, especially cinema. In this passage of their book, Adorno and Horkheimer are saying, and that is revolutionary for me, nothing less than that an accumulation and intensification of distraction is able to fulfil the task of negation that was originally dedicated to art, because it alters the state of the subject in the world completely. With this thought in mind it would be really funny and, at the end much less elitist, to speculate about what Adorno would say of the Internet. I expect I'll find the terms of argument less confusing in the book; nonetheless, I think of art as a cultural form requiring concentration or attention; it is distraction only in the sense that it might oppose what is expected from us. In my essay on The Ontology of Everyday Distraction: the Freeway, the Mall and Television I discuss the semifictional states of mind or zoning out induced by the built environment and mass media. I wonder if the internet (if it can be considered one thing) is just a part of this complex, vast and pervasive interconnection and circulation of day dreams and commodities. I have also written an essay on the concept of immersion as a metaphor. Loeffler would not signify distraction as a metaphor. It is in fact a concrete phase of the body, a state of the mind. It is real. I would say that distraction is ALSO a metaphor that is strongly related to social condition and state of mind. Concepts and moral attitudes are also related to historial and social specificities: could the attitudes of Krakauer and the Frankfurt School toward distraction be understood without the framework of the struggle against fascism and its use of fascination (as a form of distraction? immersion?) to make [the dream] real. Food for thought. Thanks again! Margaret Morse # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime The secret financial market only robots can see
On 09/23/2013 01:46 AM, nettime's avid reader wrote: The researchers say there’s much more to learn, especially at the border where human traders and robotic ones interact. One question is whether moving at computer speeds is inefficient because there’s less information available at that time scale—data just can’t move that fast, even electronically. Laboratory experiments suggest computers are more efficient on a human time-scale than a sub-second one. And if sub-second trading does continue, do market participants need to come up with sub-second hedges and derivatives to protect from this kind volatility? The question is poorly framed because the authors don't ask: Efficient for what? Or even better: What kind of society do we get when profit is produced - and economic activity is governed - by agents operating outside the perceptual and intellectual grasp of well over 99% of the people? Robomarkets then become an advanced case of what has been happening since the mathematization and computerization of finance began in the 1980s. I read the scientific text to which the journalistic article refers. It's a confirmation of what's already known. The principle of automated trading strategies is to provoke microvolatilities and cash in on them. Yet those strategies only work well when the markets are already volatile, as they were from 2007 onward. Since 2011 (which is outside the timeframe of the article), volatility has gone down while competition between the high-speed algo-traders has gone up. And now the regulators are moving in: http://tinyurl.com/how-the-robots-lost In my view, high-speed trading is not the invisible harbinger of a future apocalypse. It's just one more symptom of the actual apocalypse. best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
