The currently running exhibition in beijing, synthetic times, and the holding of isea 2008 in singapure both raise the question of the compatibility of media art with dictatorial regimes. I am not commenting on the quality of individual art works, and surely a show as big as the beijing one contains at least a few good artworks, yet the field as a whole must ask itself the question if it has any potential of resistance vis-a-vis the cooptation of 'digital creativity' by regimes practicing totalitarian capitalism - especially as western countries themselves are on the tipping point of becoming electoral dictatorships whereby politics is replaced by technocratic crowd management and other techniques of 'authoritarian democracy'. it is clear that in times of a funding crunch many people are happy to show any work anywhere, but the institutions and individuals participating must ask themselves where they stand when they show work in an exhibition which on the whole is a sanitised version of media art from which all notions of dissens and social critique have been purged. if this is business as usual then it is not my business, sorry, I could not leave this unnoticed ...
armin ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre