Incumbent upon Recombinant Hope: EDT's Strike a Site, Strike a Pose

Abstract

Sometimes hope acquires form: In September I998, U.S. Department of Defense launched a hostile applet against Electronic Disturbance Theater's FloodNet server. While it may seem odd, even presumptuous, to present D.O.D.'s response as hope incarnate, I want to place this singular event within a makeshift context-the rest, as they say, becoming-history...where expanding circumference of rememory spells shape of a contemporary aesthetic and political experiment in radical rearrangement of technologically social's deck furniture: the inherent civility of electronic disobedience [...the] distinction [...] between trespass with political and trespass with criminal intent (CAE 2001:33), paradoxical proposition of utopianism after end of utopia (Jameson I991), an individual/collective dialectic (upgraded to the poetic), a history of future in a hybridized sentiment as hackneyed, but contagious, as h-o-p-e. Despite indispensability of Carmen Karasic, Brett Stalbaum, and Stefan Wray to Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) as a project, in public presentations, Ricardo Dominguez functions as group's default drive. Trained as an actor, Dominguez enacts a principle from another group of which he was a member, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). CAE maintains philosophy that when working in a collective, each member's set of skills (must be) unique to cell (65). Consequently, Dominguez performs EDT, personalizing history of collective. For time being, I will bracket a discussion of significance of Dominguez's idiosyncratic narrative to focus more abstractly upon two strands of its composition-the influences of CAE and Zapatista uprising (1994) on