The Rhizome Digest merged into the Rhizome News in November 2008. These pages serve as an archive for 6-years worth of discussions and happenings from when the Digest was simply a plain-text, weekly email.

Subject: RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.18.02
From: digest@rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 17:27:01 -0400
Reply-to: digest@rhizome.org
Sender: owner-digest@rhizome.org
RHIZOME DIGEST: October 18, 2002

Content:

+editor's note+
1. Rachel Greene: We're Being Didactic - Online Learning

+announcement+
2. Step Dinkins: Call for Submissions
3. joy garnett: Tim Griffin essay online
4. goldberg AT ieor.berkeley.edu: ATC AT UCB: Victoria Vesna, 10.21.02

+work+
5. t.whid: Endnode (AKA Printer Tree)

+feature+
6. McKenzie Wark: Review - Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance:
Explorations in Tactical Media

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1.

Date: 10.18.02
From: Rachel Greene (rachel AT rhizome.org)
Subject: We're Being Didactic - Online Learning

Rhizome.org is working with the New School Online University to offer
distance learning classes. Sign up for classes like Advanced Java, Intro
to PHP, Why New Media Isn't New: A History, or others. Not only will you
help Rhizome.org generate income as you learn, but you'll be able to
study, practice and commune with other students and faculty from the
comfort of your own CPU. Private feeback from instructors, online
materials, and DIY scheduling... Sign up ends this Monday, the 21st.

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+ad+

Metamute is now running a specially commissioned article a week. In the
last 3 weeks, we've published Ben Watson's in-depth review of The
Philistine Controversy, Eugene Thacker's analysis of the state-endorsed
biotech 'debate', and James Flint's urbanist reading of Glastonbury and
Sonar festivals. http://www.metamute.com

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2.

Date: 10.17.02
From: Step Dinkins (sdink AT yahoo.com)
Subject: Call for Submissions

The SAC Gallery at Stony Brook University seeks new media and
technologically mediated works (video and new media for example) for ³[
]: In Pursuit of An American History² an exhibition to celebrate,
explore, challenge and re-imagine African-American History Month.

Send submissions on VHS, DVD, CD-ROM or Zip Disk and a CV to
African-American History Month, Department of Art, Staller Center for
the Arts, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794. Include a
SASE for the return of materials. Deadline: Monday, December 16, 2002

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+ad+

ARTMEDIA VIII CO-SPONSORED BY LEONARDO/OLATS in PARIS
http:://www.olats.org From "Aesthetics of Communication" to Net Art
November 29th - December 2nd 2002

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3.

Date: 10.15.02
From: joy garnett (joyeria AT walrus.com)
Subject: Tim Griffin essay online

Lab71 - International Art Content http://www.lab71.org/

"Physically and emotionally speaking, intimate space is no longer
strictly intimate. On the one hand, intimate space is monitored,
obtaining those informational, bureaucratic attributes that function
under the sign of surveillance. In other words, all space is at once
concrete and abstract, as it is codified and assumes legislative
character, becoming the stuff of coordinates. Any city is a potential
target, for example, the sense of which only heightens bureaucracy's
mesh with corporeality." [Tim Griffin, *Night Vision* 2001]

...read the full catalogue essay at: http://www.lab71.org/

Tim Griffin is a poet, critic and associate editor of Art Forum, former
editor of ArtByte, and former art editor at TimeOut NY.

Night Vision is a traveling exhibition curated by Joy Garnett. It
presents artists who are influenced by advanced technologies developed
by the military and government intelligence agencies for use in
research, surveillance and combat.

Lab 71 is an artist run, not-for-profit online publication that features
contemporary art from around the world. Ideas and issues that concern
artistic communities from diverse countries will be addressed, providing
opportunities for dialogue between writers, curators and artists. Lab 71
is interested in all media: painting, sculpture, video, installation,
digital art, collaboration, performance and public art.

SUBMISSIONS Lab71 is accepting submissions for publication. MFA papers
welcome. Please submit to info AT lab71.org

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4.

Date: 10.15.02
From: (goldberg AT ieor.berkeley.edu)
Subject: ATC AT UCB: Victoria Vesna, 10.21.02

ATC AT UCB:

Mind Shifting and Future Bodies: From Networks to Nanosystems Victoria
Vesna, UCLA

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium Mon, 21 Oct, 7:30-9:30pm: UC
Berkeley, Location: 160 Kroeber Hall All ATC Lectures are free and open
to the public.

Since the 1920s, when ecologists began studying food chains,
understanding networks has been of interest to scholars in many areas.
More recently, neural networks have been proposed as models for the
enormously complex structure of the human brain, containing 10 billion
neurons linked by a trillion synapses. Comparisons of the human brain
to our global interconnected communications networks abound.

Looking at patterns and geometric forms that appear repeatedly in nature
can provide insight into art projects that actively involve audiences in
social environments. For example, hexagons appear in beehives, are used
in the technological infrastructure of cellular phone systems, and are
the primary structure of buckyballs, the molecule that has helped launch
nano-science. This new science pushes the limits of our rational minds -
working at the level of atoms and molecules, using the measure of a
nanometer, about 1/80,000 of the diameter of a human hair. This talk
will look at work that addresses these ideas and to our current
collaborative project: 'zero AT wavefunction: nano dreams and nightmares'.

..............

Victoria Vesna is an artist, professor and chair of the department of
Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She defines her work
as experimental research that resides in between disciplines and
technologies. She explores how communication technologies effect
collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to
scientific innovation. She is co-director with Katherine Hayles and Jim
Gimzewski of SINAPSE, a center that promotes transdisciplinary dialogue
and collaboration.

Victoria has exhibited her work in 16 solo exhibitions, over 70 group
shows, published 20 papers and gave over 100 invited talks in the last
ten years. She is recipient of many grants, commissions and awards,
including the Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork in 1998 and the
Cine Golden Eagle for best scientific documentary in 1986. Vesna's work
has received notice in publications such as Art in America, the Los
Angeles Times, as well as Spiegel (Germany), The Irish Times (Ireland),
Tema Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil).

These and other projects are linked from: http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/ and
http://notime.arts.ucla.edu

**********************************************************************
Victoria Vesna will be introduced by
Greg Neimeyer, Asst. Prof. of Art Practice, UC Berkeley

**********************************************************************
The ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art
Museum and the Walker Art Center to present online video of ATC talks,
available both in QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and
the full 2002-2003 series schedule, please see:

www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/

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5.

Date: 10.17.02
From: t.whid (twhid AT mteww.com)
Subject: Endnode (AKA Printer Tree)

Endnode (AKA Printer Tree)

MTAA's new work is being launched tonight at Eyebeam
(http://www.eyebeam.org/artists/air02.html) and we invite everyone to
join the "Endnode" list-serv and take part in the work.

short description (from Eyebeam's site): The arts collaborative MTAA has
created a life-sized sculpture of a tree with a networked print server
in its trunk and printers on each branch that print and release a rain
of email-leaves that cascade to the ground. The public is encouraged to
email the tree through the Endnode Mailing List.

see http://www.endnode.net for more information.

the list: Join the "Endnode" mailing list here:
http://www.endnode.net/mailman/listinfo/endnode

The Endnode list-serv is an unmoderated email list which we hope will
focus on new media art. Remember, there will be hardcopy of your email
falling from the "Endnode" sculpture when you post to the list.

--
t.whid
www.mteww.com

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6.

Date: 10.11.02
From: McKenzie Wark (mw35 AT nyu.edu)
Subject: Review - Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance:
Explorations in Tactical Media

Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical
Media, Autonomedia, New York, 2002 reviewed by McKenzie Wark
(mw35 AT nyu.edu)

Even a cursory scanning of Critical Art Ensemble¹s website
(http://www.critical-art.net/) reveals a distinctive and distinguished
body of work that boldly restates the possibilities of working in the
?avant garde¹ tradition, while connecting it to the latest practices in
low-tech tactical media. Digital Resistance, their fourth book, collects
some recent papers by the group, and includes the best statement yet of
their overall approach to the nexus of theory and practice.

In making such a statement, I play into what Critical Art Ensemble (CAE)
call the "haunting problem of the archive" ­ namely, the restriction of
the open potential of the work to generate new challenges to the status
quo, by defining a space for it alongside once challenging movements,
now safely dead. While I recognize why CAE might want to avoid too
strong an identification of their work with a current movement or
historical precursor, perhaps one can look at this the other way around.
We have taken on faith the self-interested remarks by art-market
publicists in the 80s and 90s that the ?avant garde is dead¹, and hence
no longer look to it as a source of ongoing attempts to negate the
self-evident rightness and normality of the world.

Moreover, in considering complete the avant garde tradition that runs
from Dada to the Surrealists, Situationists, Art and Language group and
beyond, the analyses of commodified culture and reified life offered by
those movements becomes the last word. No new critique emerges if there
can be no new cultural-political-media practice. The value of CAE might
well be that they embark on a new kind of critical art, and in the
process develop a new critical theory. Or at least some elements of such
a theory, as we shall see I think it incomplete.

Digital Resistance contains a now-famous contribution to the debates on
tactical media, which it critiques the established practices of
triggering media spectacle, and proposes instead to bypass the media and
establish clandestine practices of subversion. CAE contend that "The
indirect approach of media manipulation using a spectacle of
disobedience designed to muster public sympathy and support is a losing
proposition."

There was a time, they recognize, when this worked. The Civil Rights
Movement, for example. But they claim that the examples where working
through the media is effective are mostly instances in which the
movement in question is at least in part furthering the interests of the
development of capitalist society, rather than opposing it. To the
extent that the Civil Rights Movement was a challenge to the archaic
social order of the American South, it could effectively work through
triggering media reactions. When it moved on to a deeper critique of
capitalism, and the racist order of the north, this strategy failed. CAE
also acknowledge examples from the underdeveloped world. The use of
media feedback loops by the Chinese Democracy Movement in Tiananmen
Square (which I examined in my book Virtual Geography) might be a
seminal example.

CAE¹s position is a pessimistic one, and seems to me to generalize an
American experience, where it is a cultural given that the critical is
marginal. It might not be appropriate for those parts of the world where
the historic social movements are alive and more or less well. All the
same, there¹s something bracing in CAE¹s pessimism, which forecloses
nostalgia and obliges one to think again about how to engage with the
present: "But what do we do now²? they ask, ³having reached the point
where visible, diversified ideologies in the West no longer exist, and
history is nothing more than a homogeneous construct that continuously
replays capitalist victories?"

The kind of tactics CAE advocate seek to work outside the media¹s echo
chamber and engage directly with the communication practices of
institutions. "The infighting that already occurs within and between
government and corporate institutions makes them a self subsidizing
target." They admit that such "a fully developed covert approach" is a
long way off. Actually, I think it is not so far off in places where
there are surviving historic social movements, which tend over time to
acquire stakeholder status within institutions. The pristine
oppositionalism combined with insider effectiveness that CAE dream of
seems to me a fantasy, peculiar to the culture of the American left.

What is more interesting than this somewhat notional theorizing about
tactical media is CAE¹s discussion of how to speak "semi publicly". In
an era in which social movements become NGOs, and NGOs develop marketing
campaigns, closing the circuit back to normality, it is timely to read
proposals for avoiding self-representations that lend themselves to
business as usual in the media. To avoid becoming fodder for the Fox
News cycle, "all that is necessary is to make it 'bad copy'." There is a
role for theory as a language of general models and hypotheticals in
keeping certain things unsaid. There¹s a long tradition of this poetics
of political speech, from Hegel¹s elusive philosophical language to the
terse epigrams of the Situationist Guy Debord.

CAE¹s antipathy toward working through the media rests not just on a
bleak assessment of tactical worth, however. In their analysis, the
media space has lost its centrality as a locus of power. "The control of
spectacular space is no longer the key to understanding or maintaining
domination. Instead, it is the control of virtual space... that is the
new locus of power."

Digital Resistance contains a very suggestive statement of CAE¹s
underlying philosophy. They argue that a ³new cosmology² is emerging,
which will replace the analog principle (order from chaos; chaos from
order) with a digital one (order from order). In the feudal order, the
analog predominated; capital, on the other hand unleashes the digital.
This paradigm shift eventually changes all aspects of life.

The tension between analog and digital expresses itself under capitalism
in the ambiguous attributes of the commodity. On the one hand, what has
most value is the analog ­ the art object for example, unique product of
the artist¹s ?genius¹. On the other, the foundation of capitalist value
is mechanical reproduction. ³The consumer wants the assurance of
reliability provided by digital replication, and on the other hand,
desires to own a unique constellation of characteristics to signify he/r
individuality.²

With the development of the computer, communication and media
industries, the digital principle inherent in capital reaches its
fullest expansion and ­ while CAE do not develop this point ­ surely the
clearest point of internal contradiction. The digitization of
information at one and the same time advances capital¹s goal of making
the commodity completely abstract and interchangeable, but also
threatens to undermine its value by removing any connection to a unique
material object.

The analog/digital divide is also a stratification principle for the
workforce. Mass industrial labor is pure digital slavery. Any worker can
substitute for any other. With capital able to traverse the whole space
of the globe, the price any laborer can get for their labor is pushed to
or even below subsistence.

On the other hand, among the laboring elite, the specialization that
results from the division of labor, particularly in science or the
culture industries, is in CAE¹s terms ?analog¹ because it is all about
differentiating workers on the basis of unique abilities, and
attributing the value of their work to their ?genius¹. Everyone expects
a bonus at the end of the year just for being ?special¹.

CAE¹s art confronts this (mostly) western version of everyday working
life with a digital practice that devalues authorial genius with
strategies of copying and counterfeit. The digital may have its
apocalyptic side in the Satanic Mills erected across the underdeveloped
world, but it also has its utopian side. Were CAE to develop more fully
the relationship both the digital and the analog have to private
property in the commodity economy, this aspect of their very suggestive
use of the analog/digital concepts might be more useful still.

The digital may be the principle of mass production, but the very
repeatability of the object devalues it. We live in an everyday world
where commodities which that are more and more interchangeable try to
present themselves under the aura of analogic singularity through
elaborate marketing strategies. The thing is supposed to be intimately
connected to a brand that at one and the same time guarantees unique
(analog) value and (digital) repeatability. The ?digital aesthetic¹ is
under these conditions mostly a denial of the digital, and in a double
sense. The origins of the thing in the 'sweatshop digital' factories of
the underdeveloped world origins of the thing are erased by a
fetishizing of the aura of its designer¹s signature. The origins of what
the commodity appears to mean in the 'Photoshop digital' world of PR
origins of its ?brand values¹ are erased by presenting the material
essence objecthood of the thing as the unique bearer of these otherwise
purely virtual qualities. The trace of material history is hidden in the
image; the fetish of the image is hidden in the material thing.

And so there may indeed by a value in a digital aesthetic that
emphasizes the utopian potential of the copy, as something that escapes
at least the second kind of fetish, if not the first. And as CAE show,
this utopian digital aesthetic has a history.

³Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It presses after an
author¹s phrase, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, replaces it
with a correct one.² So wrote the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont,
favorite poet of the Surrealist and Situationists movements, those two
great 20th century expressions of the organized avant garde. Critical
Art Ensemble (CAE) give Lautréamont¹s maxim a 21st century twist: "In
three sentences, Lautréamont summed up the methods and means of digital
aesthetics."

In an essay he wrote with Gil Wolman, Guy Debord saw in Lautréamont¹s
phrase the basis for a ³literary communism². If the ³author¹s phrase²
can be detached from the author¹s proprietary control, it becomes common
property. Perhaps, after the failure or retreat of attempts to socialize
material property, perhaps a socialization of intellectual property is
the best we can hope for. However, by focusing on the digital and the
analog, rather than on the way they become embedded in property,
particularly the emerging role of intellectual property, CAE limit the
power of their analysis.

This emerges a little more clearly in the other candidates CAE nominate
for a counter-history of the digital aesthetic tradition. As they say,
³Duchamp is the avatar of the digital.² He attacked the analog value of
the art object with his readymades, which reveal how the value of the
art object under capitalism is really only produced by its context.
Warhol further develops this aesthetic of ³no more unique objects². Both
Duchamp and Warhol play upon the contradictory nature of the commodity,
its analog value of singularity and its digital value of repeatability.
But they don¹t quite push this contradiction as far as Debord and
Wollman intuit that it can go, once the cultural commodity is on the
same digital basis as the literary text, and literary communism becomes
the utopian promise of a digital culture of free information.

Like all CAE books, Digital Resistance is available as a free download ­
a gesture toward the freeing of information from the commodity form. Yet
in the main, CAE understand the digital aesthetic as it applies to their
own practice as an avoidance of specialization and the division of
labor. By making this an attribute of the digital, they are able to open
a dialogue with a body of work not usually seen as part of the
counter-history of radical art ­ what they call the ?theater of everyday
life.¹

Judith Malina and Julian Beck¹s Living Theater might stand as the best
known example, particularly their late 60s performances of Paradise Now,
which attempt to turn the audience into participants in a process of
achieving their own collective liberation. CAE draw a useful connection
between the theater of everyday life and Alan Kaprow¹s ?happenings¹,
which are usually treated separately as belonging to the art world
rather than the theater world. CAE¹s practice is nothing if not
?interdisciplinary¹, and indeed is a critical reminder of the limits of
what usually poses as boundary breaking under that name.

>From the theater of everyday life, CAE take the principles of
³participation, process, pedagogy and experimentation.² One of the best
qualities of CAE¹s work is the consistent thinking through of their
practice both in terms of what happens ?inside¹ the group and its
projection into a world ?outside¹. Digital Resistance contains a
thoughtful justification for working in nonspecialized ?digital¹ groups:
"Collectives reside in that liminal zone -- they are neither an
individual nor an institution." They can avoid the egoism of the former
as well as the bureaucracy of the latter.

CAE advocate working in a cellular structure, in groups of limited size.
This allows for a floating hierarchy, with different members taking
responsibility for different projects. Their model is one of coalition,
not community. "CAE is unsure who really wants community in the first
place." In keeping with the preferences of the tactical media approach,
they favor tools over rules. The group structure also solves the problem
that Art & Language group member Ian Burn identified: the artist as the
brain power of a work that others, not allowed the exalted title of
artist, have to carry out. "By working in a group, CAE members are able
to resist the Warhol syndrome of factory production with underpaid
laborers."

All of these proposals reflect a knowledge of the troubled history of
avant garde groups of the past, from Dada and Surrealism to the
Situationists, the Living Theater, and Art & Language. One problem such
groups encounter is in their internal organization, which can easily
come to reflect the power relations of the outside world. The
hierarchical and dictatorial practices of the Surrealists and
Situationists are a case in point. The other problem is external, in the
sense that the discovery of the group by the media leads to its naming
and defining by outside forces, which in turn starts to turn the group¹s
activities toward a reactive practice of responding to the shadow of
their own image in the media. Dada and the Living Theater both
experienced this problem.

This awareness of the past history of avant garde follies, of
capitulation to internalized notions of ?analog¹ authority, or external
pressures to become reactive, colors CAE¹s tentative embrace of the
?tactical media¹ label. It is best to work outside the framework of
labels that people can either feel ownership towards within the group,
or which can have their meaning altered by publicity.

Tactical media, CAE suggest, enters into a period of decline precisely
as it becomes popularized. "Its recuperation by capital is almost
inevitable." Names have to be treated tactically too, rather than as
sites of long term investment. CAE found themselves ³complicit with this
categorizing process just so we could start conversations with people
uncomfortable with the unnamed." Even the most carefully anonymous
practices end up leaving their traces in the archives. Or in other
words, the representation of something is an essential part of turning
it into property. What is named can be owned.

With those protocols acknowledged, CAE stake out a position on tactical
media that sees it as a form of "digital interventionism". It starts
with the plagiarism of the everyday itself. "The already given and the
unsaid are the material of a tactical media event." In keeping with
their views on organization, they recommend a pragmatic approach to
tools: ³By any media necessary.²

If there is indeed a new cosmology at work in the world, the best and
most frightening expression of it is the rise of biotechnology. While
physics remains for CAE the analog science par excellence, biology has
stepped boldly into the digital realm with the discovery of genetic
coding and its exploitation for commercial medicine and food production.

The problem for CAE is how to take the marginal cultural practices of
the digital aesthetic and the theater of everyday life and use it to
combat the new cosmology of biotech. When many other avant garde groups
are still fighting rearguard battles against the power structures of the
20th century, CAE have embarked on a more forward looking project of
contestation. There¹s not much point in repeating the Dada gestures of
attacking art or the church.

The limit to the theater of everyday life is that it cannot escape the
politics of everyday life. What CAE want to add to its practices is a
more conceptual approach to the abstract forces of power at work in the
world. ³Globalization has created a new theater that bursts the
boundaries of the theater of everyday life. We now have a theater of
activism that has emerged out of the necessity of taking material life
struggles into hyperreality.²

The point where CAE will work in digital culture is ?analogous¹ to the
point that digital science has reached en route to its full
commodification: the point where the abstraction of the digital meets
the singularities of the analog. All that seems to be missing is a
recognition that the concept of property is precisely what lies at this
juncture, in both culture and science.

CAE are highly critical of most uses of the new technology in theater,
however. So called ?virtual theater¹ merely represents the ³worst
elements of the disembodiment of the technocratic class.² The much
ballyhooed virtual communities are for CAE merely examples of what Guy
Debord called ³enriched privation².

Confronted with a theater of everyday life trapped in a pattern of
engaging in local struggles, and a virtual theater reproducing the
alienating aspects of consumer technology, CAE look for a practice of
looping the virtual into the real. ³The body is still the key building
block of theater², they say, but the task is to explore ­ in
collaboration with a fully participating audience ­ how digital biology
is abstracting the analog body into digitized commodity value.

What CAE advocate is a ³recombinant theater². It is analogic in that it
is aimed at opening up ³multiple lines of desire², exploring both the
rational and irrational investments of the participants. Yet it will use
digital technologies in combination with a digital aesthetic to
undermine the analogic hierarchy of value on which the authority of the
scientific (or cultural) ?expert¹ rests.

In a challenging remark, CAE note that ³eugenics is an invisible social
dynamic that is quietly emerging out of the pancapitalist institutions
of the economy of excess and the nuclear family.² While they don¹t
expand on this point, their notion of the tension between the analog and
the digital could be useful for exploring the bizarre ways in which
genetic science is producing commodified life. On the one hand, genetic
manipulation undermines the analogic value of singularity and
uniqueness. On the other hand, it offers the analogic value of the
expert geneticist as a valuable resource for reengineering the organism
for increased productivity.

"If the virtual functions and is perceived as a superior form of being,
it becomes a monstrous mechanism of control for the class that regulates
access to it and mobility within it." It¹s a challenging remark, and it
can be seen to apply to both the culture industries and the emerging
biotech industries. What both have in common is an ability to use the
state to turn intellectual property into an absolute private property
right, within which to ?trap¹ the virtuality of both culture and nature.
CAE want organic being in the world to be established as the locus of
reality ­ and here we find, underneath the very contemporary language
CAE deploy, the old desire of the romantic revolutionary avant garde ­
the desire for a life without alienation.

But it is just possible that what scares CAE is not the virtual as such,
but the virtual as it appears under the control of property ­ the
virtual in the service of commodification. CAE never really specify just
who the ruling class are or how they rule, and yet everything in their
provocative work around biotechnology points toward the possibility that
this is not your grandfather¹s capitalism they ­ and we ­ are
confronting. The practice has outrun the theory. CAE discover the
positive potential of the virtuality that the digital unleashes, not
least in the avant garde tradition. So it is not the virtual that is the
enemy here. Rather, it is what becomes of the virtuality of the digital
when it is trapped within the confines of the emerging property regime
that may well be the foundation of a class beyond capital as we know it.
But what if we were to re-imagine the utopian dimension of the avant
garde, as something beyond the mere overcoming of alienation? What would
the power of the virtual, particularly the virtual released by a digital
paradigm, be like were it freed from commodification and class rule?

McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html

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Rhizome Digest is filtered by Rachel Greene (rachel AT rhizome.org). ISSN:
1525-9110. Volume 7, number 42. Article submissions to list AT rhizome.org
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