Johanna et al, Weirdly my first post did not go through so I'll try again. Writing from upstate NY's very snowy winterland and wishing all of our empyre subscribers and guests a very Happy New Year!
in regards to your post most specifically snip... Activist art is a different > matter, though it walks a thin line between patronizing benevolence > and community empowerment, it can be an agent of actual change, > creating cultural capital and symbolic force. I'm hoping you were able to follow November and early December's discussion on empyre "Viral Communication: Hactivating Design" Many of our subscribers and guests such as Zach Blas, Ricardo Dominguez, Brooke Singer among others talked about how their work, writing and actions work within yet against the system they create in as a way to implode or critique politically or socially. Actually I'll pull out Zach Blas' post most specifically as he describes his Queer Technologies project: "To put it simply: QT starts from within the capitalist system so that it may exploit its flows, distributions, and deployments in order to actually expand outside of it and corrupt it. QT has always been interested in the Deleuzian notion of accelerating a system to the point of implosion. This seems to speak to the directionalities of resistant practices, that is, QT thinks it is more productive, more subversive--in fact, it generally increases the stakes--to not primarily practice a purely oppositional resistance. Of course, when this is needed and/or called for, Queer Technologies does not hesitate to perform in this manner." By using technologies that buy into capitalism to exploit capitalism or to use complicity as a way to work back against it. Is this counterproductive? Often times it can be humorous, thought provoking, etc but is it counterproductive? Does it defeat the point? Renate Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Art Cornell University, Tjaden Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: <r...@cornell.edu> Website: http://www.renateferro.net Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space http://www.subtle.net/empyre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre Art Editor, diacritics http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/ _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
