Critical Art Ensemble Research Articles

Challenging the “Data Body” in New Media Art, 1990s–Present

The 1990s offers a rich history of innovation through various technologies like the World Wide Web, the continuation of progress in biotechnology, and continuing advances in surveillance and artificial intelligence. Despite this, we have seen how these algorithmic technologies render users hypervisible while they remain opaque. In addition, these technologies also transform the individual into a data body—a being made of code, data, and information. Therefore, the body becomes ripe for extraction, manipulation, and the predictive logic of algorithmic technologies where we are no longer beings but simply understood as data. While many scholars have identified this phenomenon through the sciences and theory, it also stems from the field of art with artists and artist-activist collectives such as Critical Art Ensemble. Analyzing this often-forgotten history reveals the way that artists and activists were responding to this technological change by conceptualizing forms of resistance through artworks, performances, and activist projects. By looking back to the 1990s and the legacies of artists-activists as predecessors to many recent examples of algorithmic resistance by the recent generation of artists, we can think about how power persists and has evolved, how we are continuously rendered data bodies today, and what new forms of resistance may look like now.

Alex & I: narrative and network resistance

ABSTRACTFor my artistic-research project Alex & I (2013–2018), I have discussed the media history and lived circumstances of the now former-refugee, Sanjeev ‘Alex’ Kuhendrarajah, to extend his narrative of migration beyond the news cycle. Having worked with images of Alex circulating online, I became interested in his digital profile as one of his many representations; as an actor on social media platforms and as a ‘data body’ (Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). (1998). Flesh machine: Cyborgs, designer babies, & new eugenic consciousness. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Retrieved from http://critical-art.net/books/flesh/, p. 145) stored in networked interoperable archives. For this text, I discuss how the requirement of migrants to submit biometric data to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for the purposes of identification is a means of control, drawing on Katja Jacobsen’s (Jacobsen, K. L. (2010). Making design safe for humans: A hidden history of humanitarian experimentation. Citizenship Studies, 14(1), 89–103, Jacobsen, K. L. (2015). Experimentation in humanitarian locations: UNHCR and biometric registration of Afghan refugees. Security Dialogue, 46(2), 144–164.) analysis of the risks arising from UNHCR’s deployment of iris scanning technology and Joseph Pugliese’s (Pugliese, J. (2012). Biometrics: Bodies, technologies, biopolitics. London: Routledge.) work on the genealogies and biopolitics of biometrics. I address Alex’s acts of self-representation on social media, particularly Facebook, as a form narrative resistance, by which he challenges the UNHCR’s modes of ‘institutional interpellation’ (Ajana, B. (2010). Recombinant identities: Biometrics and narrative bioethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 7(2), 237–258., p. 254), but is also susceptible to ‘dataveillance’, data mining and forms of network authority. Drawing on Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s (Chun, W. (2015). The dangers of transparent friends: Crossing the public and intimate spheres. In D. Allen & J. S. Light (Eds.), From voice to influence: Understanding citizenship in the digital age (pp. 105–128). Chicago: University of Chicago Press) concerns about user profiling and data capture on social media, I offer possible modes of network resistance and discuss storytelling as a form of ‘narrative bioethics’ with reference to Btihaj Ajana (Ajana, B. (2010). Recombinant identities: Biometrics and narrative bioethics. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 7(2), 237–258.).

Smell, Terrorism and Performance

The increase in terrorist attacks over the past two decades has generated a proliferation of images distributed across a wide range of media. Tragic scenes of bombings, shootings and their aftermath are screened over and over to the point of hypnotizing viewers by the excessive repetition. Yet not all forms of terrorism lend themselves to visual spectacle. Smell-related attacks—what I call odoterrorism—utilize noxious compounds to inflict harm and inculcate fear. What differentiates odoterrorism from other terrorist tactics is that visual evidence can be slight and so offers little to news media eager for dramatic footage. Odoterrorism, however, not only typifies the actions of malevolent agents to weaponize air, it can also serve as the means for a growing genre of performance using smell. War remains a preoccupation of contemporary artists, and odours are a potent means to introduce disgust, abjectness, decay and sometimes danger. Through a discussion of four olfactory works—by Critical Art Ensemble, Santiago Sierra, Survival Research Laboratories, and Clara Ursitti—this article explores how artists mobilize olfactory-based actions to destabilize normal viewing practices and to convey the vulnerability of the body. Nauseating smells effectively introduce viscerality to shock visitors into a state of intense sensory presentness, and to short-circuit rationalizations about war that gloss over its manifold horrors. Through strategies of simulation, participation, intervention, and post-performativity, these artists formulate pungent critiques of war and violence through its olfactory dimension.

“Learning from Las Vegas”: Border Aesthetics, Disturbance, and Electronic Disobedience. An Interview with Performance Artist Ricardo Dominguez

Since the 1980s the performance artist Ricardo Dominguez has been involved in collaborative art projects experimenting with political aesthetics. Critical Art Ensemble, formed in1987, explored inte ...

The FBI and biohackers: an unusualrelationship: The FBI has had some success reaching out to the DIY biology community in the USA, but European biohackers remain skeptical of the intentions of US law enforcement.

The FBI and biohackers: an unusualrelationship: The FBI has had some success reaching out to the DIY biology community in the USA, but European biohackers remain skeptical of the intentions of US law enforcement.

Online photography beyond the selfie: The “shareware body” as tactical media in works by Érika Ordosgoitti

The growth of internet penetration in Latin America, as digital culture scholars have revealed (Taylor & Pitman, 2013), has seen the emergence of tactical media practitioners who push the boundaries of aesthetic form and received discourses. This article examines the use of performance, photography and social media in works by Venezuelan artist Érika Ordosgoitti to assert that her use of Facebook is a deliberate form of “electronic disturbance” (Critical Art Ensemble, 1994) that expands the traditional spatial and temporal horizons of performance. By shorting conventional circuits for the circulation of art, Ordosgoitti’s practice engages broader audiences in critical debates about normative controls of photography and bodily representation in social media. Ultimately, the article contends that the depiction of artist’s nude body is a critical gesture that replaces the complacent selfie with a contestatory “shareware body”.

Bouquet

Abstract: In response to instructions by the Critical Art Ensemble to “commit a crime with a humanitarian outcome,” Toronto-based artist Diane Borsato decided to steal flowers from neighbours’ gardens and give the bouquet as a surprise gift to her mother. This photo-essay follows her through this and other acts of floral repurposing, collectively titled Bouquet (2006–ongoing), as an aesthetic act.

Performative Writing as Tool for Social Change

According to Critical Art Ensemble, in our society (a pancapitalist society), the education system and media have become dominant institutions of socialization (14). If this is case, and I believe it is, it is important to look to these institutions to see what it takes to 'succeed' and whether or not this 'success' can be challenged. I would argue that single most important thing in both these institutions is ability to communicate or use language 'effectively'. More specifically, education emphasizes need to write in way that prescribes to certain established norms. The media reinforces these norms in their hiring practices and in deciding what is fit to print or televise, ultimately marginalizing 'others'. Following this course of logic it would make sense that writers are very influential. However Minh-ha reminds us that in current situation, such discrimination and opposition, it is hardly surprising that writer should be viewed as social parasite... her/his living largely relies on generosity of that portion of society called literate {Woman, Native, Other 10). Here lies problem of who are literate, and what type of literacy is recognized. Therefore, I believe that we need to recognize and use 'alternative' forms of communication or ways in which to convey meaning, whether that is through visual art, performance, dance, or in case of this paper, new forms of literary art as Minh-ha would call it. More specifically I will take deeper look at 'alternative' writing styles, where they arose from, why they emerged, what some of these forms look like to point out their possibilities and challenges for social change in future.As focal point of cultural consciousness and social change, writing weaves into language complex relations of subject caught between problems of race and gender and practice of literature as very place where social alienation is thwarted differently according to each specific context (Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other 6). With such an intense emphasis on writing, as 'focal point of cultural consciousness and social change' writer has very important and extremely challenging role. Minh-ha continues to emphasize role of writer, Charged with intentionality, writing is therefore disclosing (a secret), and reading is believing. The writer as personified releaser of meaning produces envelopes whose more or less brilliant colors serve to decorate 'the (theological) message {Woman, Native, Other 30). The writer is endowed with an immense amount of power and shapes society's understanding of what is real and what matters (or gets counted). Therefore perspectives of marginalized others are often avoided. This new type of performative writing would represent all viewpoints, including those in style and presentation. Minh-ha's work uses different forms of conveying meaning including storytelling, poetry and filmmaking from third-world woman's perspective. But where else can we move to challenge 'traditional' ways of writing?Minh-ha describes writing similar to a game that defies its own rules, as an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting 'me' into language, but with creating an opening where 'me' disappears while T endlessly come and go, as nature of language requires {Woman, Native, Other 35). She suggests move away from individualistic narcissistic thinking and writing towards direction to remove barriers between 'me' and 'Other.' According to Minh-ha, writing should 'defy its own rules' and I would extend this not only in form, but also in topic including histories not normally told. While at same time recognizing importance of letting writer move fluidly through text without claiming authority. Rather, writing as reflection of living in our social world. At moment author claims authority separation is re-established and important connections are eliminated. …

Culturing Food: Bioart and In Vitro Meat

In a 1961 essay, Roland Barthes argues that a central feature of modernity is the proliferation of ‘social situations’ in which food serves not just to nourish bodies but to communicate identities ...

Carnal Light

Carnal Light

Reinventing Precarity

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) transforms thought into action in this mini-manual on the appropriation and repurposing of precarity. Through tactical, ecological intervention, the collective attempts to contribute to a democratic biopolitics that helps to sustain the health and diversity of micro and macro ecosystems.

Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-Political Age (review)

Reviewed by: Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-Political Age Adam W. Nixon Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-Political Age. By Ryan Reynolds. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2008; pp. 212. The essential question posed in Ryan Reynolds's stimulating book Moving Targets: Political Theatre in a Post-political Age is existential: "Is there such a thing as political performance in the post-political age?" Reynolds, an American scholar and theatre artist working in New Zealand, wonders at the utter lack of belief in alternative social structures in our current moment. He writes, with some disappointment, that the grand ideas of the past have been subsumed into the market of late-stage capitalism. Using the postmodern theories of Baudrillard and Jameson as his lens, Reynolds views late-stage capitalism as a "moving target" in the crosshairs of political theatre, which itself must remain a moving target so as to avoid commodification by, and absorption into, the market of late capitalist exchange. Moving Targets is concerned with the efficacy (or lack thereof) of postmodern performance in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Chapter 1 examines the conundrum of being defined by the very postmodern conditions that political artists seek to critique. Chapter 2 examines the work of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, based in New York City. Chapter 3 focuses on Reynolds's own work with Free Theatre Christchurch in New Zealand. Chapter 4 examines Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an avant-garde performance collective from Toronto. And chapters 5 and 6 return to New Zealand, where Reynolds theorizes his own work in the broader context of political performance in the West. In chapter 1, Reynolds places Fredric Jameson, Augusto Boal, and Baz Kershaw in conversation, finding a method by which political performance can be effective even if its form is pastiche. Reynolds aligns himself with Boal and Kershaw, insisting on the possibility that a performer can, at least momentarily, transcend commodification in the marketplace and achieve political efficacy—even if that efficacy is fleeting. The important question for Reynolds is not how efficacy is achieved (form), but what is achieved (outcome). Parody/pastiche, clothes on, clothes off, gender, sex, sexuality—all is eventually consumed by the marketplace, concedes Reynolds, who nonetheless maintains that if an opening of consciousness is achieved in performance, then the political has been realized within the aesthetic. Chapter 2 offers a detailed analysis of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. As he documents, Reverend Billy appears in full religious costume atop a soap box in Times Square engaging in "mock sermons," organizing store invasions, preaching against mega-retailers, leading his choir in "Stop Starbucks" chants, and calling for the voluntary withdrawal of large corporations from the local economy. Against this backdrop, Reynolds details the myriad ways in which Reverend Billy has ironically commoditized himself: he offers classroom lectures for $500, sells appearances, and organizes events funded by rival retailers. By Reynolds's account—with a nod to Jameson—commodification is the end of the political. He reminds us that punk rock, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, and hippies have all been subsumed and commodified to a significant degree by capitalist culture. He tells us that simply having radical aims or controversial content is insufficient, since the capitalist system is so adept at incorporating opposition into commodity culture. In such a world, is it possible for an aesthetically compelling avant-garde artist to set up a website that sells T-shirts and still remain avant-garde? Of the performers Reynolds profiles, CAE (discussed in chapter 4) is in many ways the most compelling, in that it appears to have best resisted market commodification. It has even provoked severe reactions from government authorities, including the Canadian government's absurdly fabricated charges of terrorism, which led to members' arrest and trial. Even if these charges are dismissed, CAE could face bankruptcy or ruin; if they are upheld, the troupe could face prison terms. According to Reynolds, CAE achieves autonomy from the marketplace by continually transforming its aesthetics. In one type of performance it produces and distributes fake television commercials and newspaper circulars, while in another type of performance it screens audience members genetically...

Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st-Century Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st-Century Performance Spencer Schaffner Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st-Century Performance. Edited by Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 240. An increasing number of contemporary performance forms involve new technologies. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon's edited collection Sensualities/Textualities and Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st-Century Performance, explores this highly technological present in the world of performance, suggesting that new technologies are augmenting, not replacing, the body in an array of experimental works. This collection tracks an emerging dialogue in contemporary performance between bodies and what science fiction writers have termed "the machines." Serving as a guide to this emergent field, Broadhurst and Machon's book shows how technologically rich performance forms explore, comment on, and, in some cases, critique the computer-integrated age in which we live. The collection consists of fifteen chapters written by practitioners and critics alike, each of which suggests that, despite the expanding variety of technological options available to artists, the body maintains its centrality in most performance texts. Instead of understanding the body as distinct from technology, however, the contributors to the collection describe performing bodies as one of several technologies used in any given performance. Innovative contemporary artists and companies demonstrate, this collection argues, that bodies are technological, and, reciprocally, that technologies can be understood through embodied performance. Not surprisingly, interactivity is a recurring theme here. Readers interested in how contemporary artists implement interactive digital-media forms in performance will find Troika Ranch, the Critical Art Ensemble, and Bodies in Flight particularly thought-provoking for the ways they use live relay cameras, neurological imaging, and computer software as active participatory elements in their staged work. As Broadhurst describes in the book's grounding first chapter, the New York City dance company Troika Ranch relies just as much on instrument data-interface and Open Sound Control software as it does on its dancers. Machines, in a sense, are part of the company. Performing with digitized and manipulated projections of their own forms, the members of Troika Ranch create an iterative conversation of movement: dance creates projected images, which inspire more dance. Neither dancer nor computer has primacy in this relationship, as the two reproduce each other's movements onstage. This theme of interactivity extends beyond the relationship between embodied performer and machine to include the audience. Tracey Warr's chapter "Texts from the Body" deals with Bruce Gilchrist's installations involving neurological imaging. In her detailed study of Gilchrist's work, Warr shows how technologically mediated installations of the kind that Gilchrist creates—in one such work, the artist sleeps while gallery-goers attempt to interact with his brainwaves—cannot be reduced to simple claims about the ubiquity of computing or encroaching industrial consumer culture. Indeed, many of the contributors to this collection argue that technology is a complicated means of engaging the body as a somatic reservoir of emotion and feeling. Sensualities, as Broadhurst and Machon's title suggests, are not necessarily diminished in supposedly sterile technologized encounters with computers, but instead, in some cases, are intensified. [End Page 486] No treatment of contemporary performance would be complete without a nod to some of the best-known and most provocative artists of our time. Accordingly, John Freeman considers John Leguizamo's work, Josephine Machon analyzes the plays of Caryl Churchill, and Stelarc discusses his own interactive piece "Prosthetic Head." The latter is one of the highpoints of the collection, as Stelarc's three-dimensional, animated chat-bot (gallery-goers converse with the virtual head in real time) captures both the fear and the fantasy of robots as human surrogates. Broadhurst and Machon are careful to balance the number of chapters about individual artists with as many about artistic collectives, both to avoid endorsing the idea of the lone genius and to highlight the importance of collaboration in much contemporary innovative art. In this collection, innovation is frequently identified with the technique of remix (the recombination of previously released and published materials), which is often used as a distinct form of politicized social commentary. Consider, for example, the dance...

Tactical Media (review)

Reviewed by: Tactical Media Alex Cummings (bio) Tactical Media. By Rita Raley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. ix+195. $19.50. In this original and wide-ranging book, Rita Raley examines how technologies of data visualization and gaming can serve as tools for new kinds of political resistance. A literary scholar, Raley approaches websites, installations, and other forms of new media art from an aesthetic perspective, studying these objects more as texts than technologies. When Raley looks at a video game, she examines it not primarily as digital entertainment or a political act, but as an artwork whose political message is embedded in its technological form. Tactical Media is, in short, a contribution to the growing literature on new media art, exploring how contemporary artists have used information technology to challenge capitalism in an age of globalization. The book unfolds in three chapters that center on immigration, antiwar [End Page 667] activism, and finance capital. As these subjects suggest, Raley is not telling the story of a unified or coherent political movement. The targets of her activists range from McDonald’s and George W. Bush to intellectual property interests, which the art collective Ubermorgen skewered by hacking Amazon.com and making thousands of books available for free online. A key example is decidedly low-tech: the group DoEAT simply pasted new messages on signs along the U.S.-Mexican border meant to warn of immigrants crossing the highway. Activists replaced the warning beneath the silhouette of a mother, father, and child with “Free Market” and “Now Hiring,” reminding drivers of why families might be dashing in front of their cars (p. 31). This “border hack,” as Raley calls it, is one of many acts that seek to defamiliarize the signs of everyday life, pursuing a series of provocative events or spectacles rather than a program of systematic change. For Raley, groups like Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men substitute a “micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education” for an older leftist paradigm of revolution (p. 1). In this sense, Tactical Media is an ambivalent book that attempts to make the case that frequently symbolic, technology-based activism can illuminate the inner workings of finance capitalism and the contemporary security state. Raley positions this activism against the increasingly abstract representational systems of the stock market, economic theory, and the “information society” in general (p. 132). New media art can reveal a “parallax,” she suggests, contrasting digital systems of control with the heavy weight of life as it is experienced by actual human beings (p. 143). In doing so, she juxtaposes projects like John Klima’s ecosystm, which used Reuters stock data to represent stock transactions as bursting knots of light, with Allan Sekula’s photos of harbors and shipping containers. The photos unambiguously convey the material reality of a global market that celebrates instantaneity and the erasure of space, while ecosystm also creates an intelligible experience out of a financial world that seems esoteric and inaccessible to all but its most privileged adepts. At first, projects like ecosystm seem merely to depict the workings of the financial system, reporting the ups and downs of the very mechanism that they purport to critique. However, Raley convincingly argues that these works do more than reflect or represent the markets in a one-to-one relationship. Rather, they interpret the data (and the vast web of social relations that produces them) through models, portraying currencies as flocks of migratory birds or a market as a plant that receives light and water based on the success or failure of stocks. These metaphors differ from the conventional wisdom of neoclassical economics, which conceives of markets as dynamic but hermetic systems that naturally trend toward equilibrium. Like DoEAT’s border signs, such works aim to jostle the viewer into seeing social relations in a new light; a war game in which it is impossible to win, [End Page 668] for instance, subverts the typical experience of game play while also calling into question the possibility of victory in the “war on terror” (p. 86). Tactical Media places these works in a broader historical context by drawing on a dizzying array of thinkers, from philosophers Michel...

Electronic Civil Disobedience: Inventing the Future of Online Agitprop Theater

We see that a certain revolutionary type is not possible, but at the same time we comprehend that another revolutionary type becomes possible, not through a certain form of class struggle, but rather through a molecular revolution, which not only sets in motion social classes and individuals, but also a machinic and semiotic revolution.—Félix Guattari (qtd. in Raunig)We follow the speed of dreams.—Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, The Speed of Dreams (2007)Critical art ensemble staged the theory of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as a gamble against a form of the all-too-present future of “dead capital,” otherwise known as late capital. In our 1994 book The Electronic Disturbance, Critical Art Ensemble argued that dead capital was being constituted as an electronic commodity form in constant flow (11). Capital had been, was, and would continue to be reensembling itself, as the contemporary elite moved from centralized urban areas to decentralized and deterritorialized cyberspace (13). For Critical Art Ensemble, it was clear that cyberspace, as it was called then, was the next stage of struggle. The activist reply to this change was to teleport the system of trespass and blockage that was historically anchored to civil disobedience to this new phase of economic flows in the age of networks: “As in civil disobedience, primary tactics in electronic civil disobedience are trespass and blockage. Exits, entrances, conduits, and other key spaces must be occupied by the contestational force in order to bring pressure on legitimized institutions engaged in unethical or criminal actions” (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience 18). As we imagined it in the early 1990s, electronic disturbance was the core gesture that could initiate a new “performative matrix” (Electronic Disturbance 57).

Seized and Displayed

Book Review| September 01 2008 Seized and Displayed SEIZED Critical Art Ensemble and Institute for Applied Autonomy Hallwalls Contemporary Arts CenterBuffalo, New York June 7 – July 19, 2008 Claudia C. Pederson, Claudia C. Pederson CLAUDIA C. PEDERSON is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Visual Studies Department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nicholas A. Knouf Nicholas A. Knouf NICHOLAS A. KNOUF is a PhD student in the Information Science Program at Cornell University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2008) 36 (2): 31. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2008.36.2.31 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Claudia C. Pederson, Nicholas A. Knouf; Seized and Displayed. Afterimage 1 September 2008; 36 (2): 31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2008.36.2.31 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2008 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The four-year fight for biological art

Steven Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was cleared in April of wire and mail fraud charges, four years after the FBI seized art supplies from his home that included laboratory equipment and bacterial cultures. Kurtz is a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, which recently exhibited an installation called Immolation at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool, UK, showing the effects of incendiary weapons on samples of human skin.

Exposing globalisation: Biopolitics in the work of critical art ensemble

to the memory of Julian Beck who first showed me what is possible with theatre and power and life I am very naive. When I first encountered the word globalisation I felt an instant gratification. A...

Beta-Utopian Order

Beta-Utopian Order

Editorial

Editorial