By Seb Franklin.
In The Exploit Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker speculate
that "[f]uture avant-garde practices will be those of nonexistence."
This extraordinary claim is a response to the current ubiquity of
digital technology and its impact on cultural politics; if existence
becomes a question of being classified informatically, the avoidance
of this classification, or nonexistence, becomes of paramount
importance. The discussion of nonexistence in The Exploit opens with
a question, one that forms the basis of this essay: "how does one
develop techniques and technologies to make oneself unaccountable
for?" Directly following this question comes a specific, material
example through which a crucial distinction between "unaccountable
for" and "invisible" or "absent" is made -- the use of a laser
pointer, aimed into a surveillance camera in order to 'blind' it. In
this situation, the camera is not destroyed nor is the individual
shining the laser actually hiding, or invisible; instead, they are
simply not present on the particular screen or data set recorded by
the camera in question. The same is true of the tricking of a server,
causing it to record a routine event when one goes online. These
kinds of tactics, "tactics of abandonment", are "positive
technologies" for Galloway and Thacker. They are entirely distinct
from absence, lack, invisibility and nonbeing because they are "full"
or rather, because they "permeate." The practical consequences of
Galloway and Thacker's formulation of nonexistence are clear: It's
not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on
the grid, in potentially full informatic view, but in a way that
makes one's technical specification or classification impossible.
<http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/06/on-game-art-circuit-bending-and.htm>monochrom
at 6/13/2009 01:38:00 PM
