ART AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET AGE
ART AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET AGE
By Domenico Quaranta
© Arte e Critica. All rights reserved
“Counter communication is more global than ever… the days of off-line activists, condemned to street demonstrations and fighting to be listened to and have their arguments recognized with the press, are numbered.” Geert Lovink [1]
May 1999. In the middle of the electoral campaign George W. Bush, governor of Texas and running for the presidential elections, snapped: “there ought to be limits – there ought to be limits, to, uh, to freedom”. The blunder did not go by unnoticed, and this unhappy remark gave some of the most important American newspapers this result: an internet site, gwbush.com, created by a group of famous American pranksters, that looked like the Official Bush website but with the contents controversially modified.
This date can be taken as a symbol of a new historic phase of political activism. With the skilled use of the Web and the similarly skilled manipulation of information, the authors of the site, the collective ®™ark, have managed, at no cost, to give their operation global visibility, and to make their controversial objective the victim of his own words.
At the beginning of the 90s, the Critical Art Ensemble hoped for a fusion between the hacker’s technical capacities and the activist’s struggle to create a new form of hacker activism, the “electronic civil disobedience” [2].
For the American group it was the only way to give a useless and innocuous activism, one that continues to be fought in the street while power and politics migrate to the Net, vitality and a future. The activist front knew how to face this challenge, and through the 1990s they completely rewrote their strategies, using new media and taking inspiration from it so as to free it from its traditional uses. Thus slogans such as “don’t hate the media, be the media” were born, and terms such as “hacktivism” or “tactical media” appeared, as well as practices such as the “Netstrike” (or virtual sit-in) and the “flash mob” (a sudden mobilization achieved through mobile communication devices), battles fought with bullets of press releases (or low resolution videos). Names like Seattle, Chiapas and Indymedia immediately controlled a situation that had completely changed, where the Molotov is discarded in favour of the digital camera and where anyone, from any position, can have access to the global network (and get global visibility, if know how to use it).
What relationship is there between the development of new media, the birth of a new activism and the powerful return of political art after almost thirty years of (apparent) silence? The answer could seem simple and singular (that political art is born out of renewed activism), in reality it is complex and multi-faceted. If we analyze this new activism’s genetic code, we discover that its forefathers lurked in the very subcultures that in the 80s and 90s collected, discussed, questioned and rewrote the lesson of the 60s and 70s, from Situationism to Fluxus, from Conceptual to Punk. We are talking about neoist festivals, the mail art network and the practice of culture jamming from Negativland to Adbusters, about the Canadian group General Idea and its work at the end of the 80s on AIDS, about collective identities and Luther Blisset, Franco Berardi Bifo and Strano Network; about Tommaso Tozzi, student of the Fluxus artist Giuseppe Chiari, activist and artist and Heath Bunting and the collective Mongrel, who have come to new media from graffiti and London street culture. They are all “artistic” experiences, but have developed outside of the traditional art system, and far from the attention of its audience. In this sense Marco Scotini is right when he states, “It is definitely necessary to make a distinction with respect to the 70s. The art of that period that has political motivations, with conceptual or social roots, still has a clear idea of the museum and the cultural system. Although it represents a radical critique it doesn’t escape the system. If one wants to determine the background of the current phase of exodus from art one needs to look for it mainly in those components that made up a leakage of Politics, that is autonomy, the 77, independent communication. It is not by chance that my exhibition Disobedience, which opened in January in Berlin, opened with a room that was political rather than artistic”[3].
The artists that use new media are among the first to realize their “tactical” potential, and to consequently exploit it, beating the activists themselves, and anticipating by ten years what the art system now recognizes as the latest fashion. Whoever knows net art history is shocked that Documenta 2002 and exhibitions such as Hardcore (Paris, Palais de Tokyo, February-May 2003) needed to happen so that art magazines could begin to talk about “collective strategies” or “media activism”: and all this when the most resounding incidents of media hacktivism had basically taken place between 1996 and 2001.
Digital Hijack dates back to 1996, with which the Etoy group kidnapped around 600,000 users from search engines in three months, redirecting them to their own site. In 1998 Electronic Disturbance Theatre, a collective led by the artist Ricardo Dominguez launched, with FloodNet, the first example of “digital zapatismo”: which is, essentially, software that automates the mechanism of a digital sit-in, blocking access to an institutional site for a finite amount of time (their first target was the site of the Mexican president Zedillo). In 1999 0100101110101101.org seized the Vatican site for a year, using a free web address (vaticano.org) to put online a slightly modified, although very cunning, version of the original, vaticano.va, inaugurating digital cybersquatting. 2000 was the year of great Toywar manoeuvres, where the Etoy group opposed the eToys corporation. The battle, born out of the big company’s clumsy attempt to get rid of the small group with (almost) the same name, was fought with bullets of information and won by Etoy thanks to a careful use of the media and an artful deployment of an army made up of the whole on-line activism world. However 2000 is also the year of the great operation Vote Auction, built around a site that, during the already problematic American elections, offered the chance to put your vote up for auction to the highest bidder. Again, the realities moving around this site were more crafty than media hacking, from ®TMark to the European Ubermorgen, that made journalists talk about this initiative for months, keeping up doubts about the effective working of the auction and its capacity to influence the election results.
But if the birth and over ten year evolution of the internet had simply brought about the development of what first the CAE and now Graham Meikle calls “electronic civil disobedience” [4], of which those aforementioned activists constitute some of the most important examples, its significance on the evolution of political action would be considered somewhat limited. In reality, the Internet has been much more than that over this period. As Manuel Castells notes, in the 90s the Internet has provided the main movements scattered around the world the possibility of organizing and communicating amongst themselves, of maintaining a local base and a global aperture, of reaching a wide public, of fighting official communication with the same amount of effective alternative information. The Seattle movement, which was organized around the Independent Media Centers scattered around the world, “swims like a fish on the web” [5]. And this is because the web, as Scotini notes, “is a sphere of social action, with as yet undefined boundaries and with a whole series of regulative processes needing to be identified. A communication that is more or less free is not at stake but rather the construction of new political subjects… In this sense the web is not only a new field of social action but, also, of artistic practices in general” [6]. The new political artists are politically trained on the web, and they learn how to work with the communicative strategies and the media impact of their works from the tactical media. It is not by chance that today metaphors taken from the web, such as ‘reality hacker’ are so fashionable. When Jota Castro hangs Berlusconi upside down with the European Union flag, distributes a survival guide for demonstrators or invites the Calabrians who live around the detention centers to wear T-shirts with “welcome, immigrants”, when Gianni Motti stages a military blitz in the Prague National Gallery, or chains up sixty Arabs in a church in Lucca, when Santiago Sierra does not allow access to the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, or Enzo Umbaca sings his work in the carriages of the underground like any other beggar, what they are doing is no longer, as in the 70s, political action in an artistic space for a limited public, but is a powerful strike at a weak spot, with the aim of bringing their message, using the tactics of marketing and advertising, to wedge themselves into the media. And to win a space in our imagination.
Notes:
[1] Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition, V2_NAi Publishers, 2003. Tr. It. Internet non è il paradiso, Apogeo, Milano 2004
[2] Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience, Autonomedia 1996. Tr. It. Disobbedienza civile elettronica ed altre idee impopolari, Castelvecchi, Roma 1998.
[3] Personal communiqué, 6th March 2005
[4] Graham Meikle, Future Active, Pluto Press Australia, 2002. Tr. It. Disobbedienza civile elettronica, Apogeo, Milano 2004.
[5] Manuel Castells, Internet Galaxy, Oxford University Press, 2001. Tr. It. Galassia Internet, Feltrinelli 2002.
[6] Personal communiqué, 6th March 2005.
