An introduction to my installation "
DIENST" at
Wohnlabor Berlin March 20th- May 15th
All New Media is Political.All politics is fundamentally economics. If all people were satisfied with their position in the economy in which they exist, there would be no politics as we know it today.
All new media is political, regardless of what appears on the screen or of what rings from the speaker membranes, digital media subsumes, integrates globalized prerequisites which form and inter-penetrate everything we may aesthetically perceive. These globalized prerequisites are international manufacturing standards, global raw materials transportation and refinement chains, international trade agreements; in short: the corporate world as administered through
local, national and super-national politics.
Therefore, Art made with New Media is a realm of globalized economics and thus a realm of politics, and this should surprise and disturb no-one.
The familiar figure of this realm is that of the woman or man in uniform of the military or of the police. These uniforms subordinate these citizens’ civil individuality as they become an anonymous embodiment, the physical manifestation of the Law. The language of the Law provides the structure of the society which is the context of the creative new media artist. National or super-national, there is no new media art without soldiers, just as there is no language without grammar.
My work and this talk attempt to elucidate a symbiosis of artistic freedom and of political (military/police) order in the concept of avant garde. The expression 'avant-garde', of course, emerged from military parlance, the soldiers of the front lines, often sacrificed in order to make the enemy reveal itself. The avant garde is posthumously crowned with glory for having sacrificed themselves in the service of the nation. Thus are avant garde artists in all their
desperate critical intensity, zealots in the service of the hegemonies which foster them.
One who searches for radical alternatives to contemporary industrialized culture's overweening dependence on hegemonies, the violence of the internal and external politics, had better leave the 'avant-garde' and explore an aesthetics of '
baisser la garde' (
die Garde herunternehmen?/to lower the guard).
This exhibition is a materialization in the public space of an attempt to model a working microcosm of the state of contemporary symbiosis between the forces of order and those of the spontaneous creativity of the artist. It is a three dimensional, "
wissenschäftliche Vergegenwärtung" (Philosophical Concretisation) of the theory stated above, using the techniques of New Media.
: iMine and le Laboratoire de Deberlinisation.
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