My Re-Enchantment

Art residency at Hamilton MAS from October to December 2022

This week I begin my three-month residency ending with an exhibition called The Re-Enchantment at the art project space, Hamilton MAS, Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK.

This residency and exhibition will allow me to reexamine my artistic connection with nature. After spending over 25 years working with digital technologies. I want to relearn what it’s like to be humanly connected to nature again in a technological world under the conditions of climate collapse. What personal questions will emerge through the artmaking process, and what kind of stories and images will begin to find themselves as the work progresses?

C24. Head and Hole 1. A4. Collage, paint, drawing. 2022. Marc Garrett.

Crow Boy Clutching at Tree, 1987, oil on Canvas, 8 x 5 ft. By Marc Garrett.

Our addiction to technology and capitalism has left us impoverished, where we are all devalued alongside nature. This new work marks a new episode in my life as a time for re-enchantment. It’s not just nature that urgently needs dealing with; it’s us. I aim to reconfigure my relationship with the world. I am reconnecting to art I made over thirty years ago when I lived in the countryside, bringing back themes that explored elements of folk mythologies and methods of abstraction mixed with figurative motifs. I will bring a hybrid approach that includes aspects of nature, drawing, painting, and other types of art making, ideas around networks, and the human body and mind. At the same time, it will reflect on aspects of my cancer condition, which I’m presently recovering.

“After cycling and getting back home, putting food waste into the compost bin and cleaning the cat sick off the bottom of my shoes, I found this amazing piece of slug art. The universe is telling me something.”

C25. Hole 2. A4. Collage, paint, drawing. 2022. Marc Garrett.

Residency Work Plan

I will work in the shopfront space of Hamilton Mas in front of passers-by, who will have the option to enter the space and ask questions about the work being made. These few months will be dedicated to producing a series of paintings and drawings on paper and canvas, eventually filling the gallery’s walls. At the end of this intensive period, I will stage an exhibition and an event and present the paintings, different types of art produced and the ideas explored. I will invite artists, conservationists, and experts relevant to the debate in the region for a public conversation about how life would be different without global digital technologies. After that, I intend to build on what has been gathered and learned to be included in a longer exhibition at Hamilton Mas in April 2023.

This residency and exhibition will allow me to reexamine my artistic connection with nature. After spending over 25 years working with digital technologies.

Living the Proposition – Art Worlding and The Hologram

By Marc Garrett. 2022.

The “capitalist totality” only exists in our imagination. I do not think there is a capitalist totality. I think there’s capital, which is extraordinarily powerful and represents a certain logic that is actually parasitic upon a million other social relations, without which it couldn’t exist. [1] (Graeber, 2012)

If the early part of the 21st century has taught us to believe anything, it’s that we all live in a dystopian movie with a script we cannot change. A disaster movie where capitalism and man-made climate catastrophe exist hand in hand, and we only ever get to play the bit parts. In this lived-through, nightmarish movie, exploitative technology continues to dominate our networked online activities, consciousness, and behaviours with its various forms of libertarian-backed accelerationism. On top of these already troubling dominations, we’re caught up with the constant distress of austerity, low wages, loss of decent jobs, poverty, racism, sexism, extractivism, colonialism, collapsing healthcare systems, Covid-19, right-wing populism; it goes on and on. We explore art practices that disrupt the systematic, hegemonic-based mythologising of geniuses. To counter these disasters imposed by self-serving elites, the question is how to evolve beyond imposed institutional and historical protocols and defaults that act as gatekeeping mechanisms.

In 2014 artist and writer Lucy Lippard concluded that ‘the ultimate escape attempt would be to free ourselves from the limitations of preconceived notions of art, and in doing so, help to save the planet’ 2. Lippard’s approach is echoed in other artists’ networked practices and artworks. These operate within the ecosystems of lived experience, typically outside of formal art world contexts. However, they may use “the business of art” to connect with artists and art audiences, exploiting networked infrastructures and art world contexts to lend power to the transformations they want to see. For example, Heath Bunting, Pirate Care, and Cassie Thornton [3] use networks, infrastructure, and decentralisation to critique and replace violent and extractive systems. Bunting currently runs artist’s training workshops in artist resilience. He covers outdoor skills such as clothing and equipment, bushcraft and urban survival skills. These activities provide a backdrop for discussing the subversive, autonomous and collective aspects of practising the arts in the context of “Artist Resilience”. [4] Meanwhile, Pirate Care is a collective syllabus organised by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, which uses technology and digital resources to build solidarity and rapport with a network of activists, scholars and practitioners who stand against the criminalisation of solidarity and for a common care infrastructure. [5]

The Hologram

In 2018 I interviewed artist and activist Cassie Thornton about her ongoing project, The Hologram, which examines health in the age of financialisation and reveals the connection between the body and capitalism.

The hyper-individualism produced by indebtedness allows us to look away from a much more in-depth story of our collective debts, financial and otherwise. We don’t know what to do with these much bigger debts, including sovereign debts, municipal debts, debts to our ancestors and grandchildren, debts to the planet, debts to those wronged by colonialism and racism and more. [6] (Thornton, 2018)

One part art, one part activism, and one part science fiction Thornton’s Hologram develops the skills and relationships we desperately need to tackle the anti-capitalist struggles of the present and the post-capitalist society of the future. [7] During the Covid-19 pandemic, Thornton, Lita Wallis and Ruth Catlow (at Furtherfield) collaborated online with many worldwide on developing The Hologram peer-to-peer health system through workshops. These were well attended by artists, art audiences, and individuals and groups working across different health practices, such as NHS workers in the UK. Many became long-term collaborators in the project.

The Hologram is now a viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practised from couches worldwide. Three non-expert participants create a three-dimensional “hologram” of a fourth participant’s physical, psychological and social health. Each becomes the focus of three other people’s care in an expanding network.

Worlding

Donna J. Haraway re-emphasized the importance of dealing with contemporary contexts of the patriarchy, politics, and climate change in the Anthropocene age, arguing that it ‘cannot be a futurist affair’. [8] Haraway uses the concept of worlding to recognise the role of cooperation and conflict in a generous set of ‘world building’ ecologies that includes other species, technologies, and forms of knowledge, rebalancing away from innovation that crowns technology as the king of the future.

What is Living the Proposition?

We need to build on, reevaluate, and relearn from the already progressive and insightful enrichments that art, technology and activism have generously produced and given us through the years – into more personalised, informed, shared, grounded disruptions and critically engaged, interdependent systems and activities of mutual alliances. Rather than proposing images or technologies of better futures, we must live the worlds we propose to bring about. This requires the inclusion of others where otherness becomes mutually affirmed as part of our social being, allowing us to reflect from within our production.
This is about mutual aid, helping each other become the people we wish to be through our working conditions and creative endeavours.

How can we nourish our artistic and imaginative needs from the ground up without making the elites stronger? Who can we trust to collaborate with to enhance our: art processes and contexts, ecological and socially engaged practices? How can we create the necessary intuitively based platforms, and create open safe spaces on the ground with continuing, life-changing projects? How can we set up friendly systems to develop nourishing decentralised and local situations beyond lip service and the usual tech industry bias and institutional hierarchies that intentionally or blindly repeat damaging patriarchal blueprints? We are the answer, and we’re already here, and we have the tools and systems that our peers have built to help forge mutual and social aid on our shared terms.

By living the proposition, we build better presents and futures that allow our artistic production and activist intentions to exist in ways that are closer to our visions and needs. It’s about reconnecting to our battered core values, what we wanted to be before funding requirements, and work or life situations diverting our desired adventures.

Art worlding allows one to live the propositions of one’s art and ideas. It is radical, creative liberation. It is emancipation as part of our daily life using DIY skills and critically in-tune social contexts that arrive through tools and platforms and meeting with others we trust to make it happen. Enacting and being the dream rather than a simulation or theory. It is joyful action. The values and methods in The Hologram, art worlding and living the proposition act as a triangle to keep us critically focused, freeing us up to examine our personal proposals with each other and see how they connect and what new worlds can unfold.

References

Graeber, D., 2012. The movement as an end-in-itself? An interview with David Graeber [Interview]. Ross Wolfe Platypus Review 43. February 2012. https://thecharnelhouse.org/2012/02/01/the-movement-as-an-end-in-itself-an-interview-with-david-graeber/
Lippard, L. R., 2014. Undermining: A Wild Ride in Words and Images through Land Use Politics in the Changing West. The New Press, Volume 9. Litvin, D., 2021.
The Hologram. A viral four-person health monitoring and diagnostic system practised from couches worldwide. https://thehologram.xyz/
Heath Bunting. In the Field: Artist workshops and technical support. http://irational.org/heath/out-door_survival/
The Pirate Care Project. https://pirate.care/pages/concept/
Thornton, C., 2020. Art, Debt, Health Care: An Interview with Marc Garrett. The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. London: Pluto Books.
Ibid.
Haraway, D. J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. 1st Edition ed. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Main image. One of Zad’s two bakeries continues to churn out bread. The Revenge Against the Commons. Furtherfield. By Jay Jordan. 2018
https://www.furtherfield.org/the-revenge-against-the-commons/

This text is a smaller version of a larger academic document with the same title. I intend to turn the research exploring the issues and contexts into a publication of interviews and essays featuring various artists, theorists, techies and activists.

Introduction to the ‘Unlocking Proprietorial Systems’ Keynote, at the Mapping festival, Geneva May 25th 2019

I presented a keynote at the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Thursday May 25th, 2019. The reading from a chapter of the same name, Unlocking Proprietorial Systems: For a More Expansive Artistic Practice, from my PhD. After my talk a few people asked whether the chapter was available to read online for download. Sadly, as part of my larger thesis it is still going through the process of being assessed by examiners at Birkbeck University. However, I thought it a good idea to the post the introduction which gives an outline and context of the larger text. You find the Stack/slides presented – here.

The paper asks about the role that arts-led critical engagement with technologies can play in unlocking the proprietorial systems that dominate our everyday social interactions both online and offline. It discusses and reaches beyond the accepted idea associated with proprietary software that certain uses of technology can and should be limited by the commercial interests of those that ‘own’ them. It explores how coercive social relations are enacted through proprietorial processes, embedded softwares, and technical infrastructures that involve their users in their own suppression. It explores how the spirit of hack values and the hacker ethic finds expression in the work of a series of artists in Furtherfield’s networks and programmes. Finally, it shows how with the advent of the latest wave of decentralised technologies we have brought the hacker ethos to Furtherfield’s current programmes of blockchain development and critique.

The meanings of the words proprietorial and proprietary are closely linked.

In the computing world, proprietary is often used to describe software that is not open source or freely licensed. Examples include operating systems, software programs, and file formats (‘Proprietary Software’).² Many involved in the Free and Open-source Software (FOSS) movement believe that it is fundamentally wrong for commercial interests to own and control our use of software because of its innately social nature. Olga Goriunova argues that software cannot be treated like an object or device because it always has social relations embedded within it. She advocates breaking away from the ‘fetish’ of proprietary software structures, and ‘commodification of social processes layered into software production and operation’.³

The Cambridge Dictionary definition of proprietorial introduces an important new perspective: ‘like an owner: He put a proprietorial arm around her’. This brings us directly to a biopolitical distinction. The term biopolitics was first coined by Rudolf Kjellén, (who also coined the term geopolitics) (Markus 35) and then; later expanded upon by Michel Foucault, arguing that certain styles of government regulated their populations through Biopower. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri developed Foucault’s ideas, saying ‘Biopower is a form of power that regulates life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and re-articulating it’.⁴ But, as we will discover later in this chapter, the term also reinforces a deep psychological bias that asserts the right of the patriarch to own our social contexts. Neoliberalism now deploys both proprietary and proprietorial systems in the interest of an elite class that accrues more power and wealth while imposing increasing uncertainty on societies.

David Harvey argues that neoliberalism permeates every aspect of our lives, masked by a repeated rhetoric around ‘individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatization, the free market and free trade’,⁵ thus legitimizing the continuation and extension of policies that consolidate capitalistic powers. The mechanics of neoliberalism take abstract capital as a pliable medium for use by the corporate elite while remaining hard to grasp for everyday people. The financial collapse in 2007/8 saw a tiny group of people overseeing matters that affected the lives of billions of people in the world – with disastrous effects. The scale of the collapse was tied to activities that entirely depended on global digital communication technologies and the operation of algorithmic processes. The complex and cumulative effects of these were poorly understood, even by those in the driving seat, and have had long-lasting consequences for the everyday lives of ordinary people and have catastrophically undermined the integrity of democratic processes.

In Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (2009), Amy E. Wendling reminds us that ‘Machine fetishism is a product of technological alienation’.⁶ The financial crash reflected the disastrous effects of machinic alienation. Now, however, after the crash of 2008, the austerity policies that sought to revive the ailing capitalist system are the proximate cause of the rise of the far right in Europe, the Tea Party in America, Brexit and of course the anarchic populism of the successful presidential campaign waged by Donald Trump.⁷

The nihilist guru, Steve Bannon, former head of Breitbart News (an alt-right publishing platform), and ex-chief strategist for Donald Trump’s Republican administration (Bannon left after seven months, in August 2017); he has been given carte blanche to talk on mainstream media as a promoter for the normalisation of far-right values,⁸ promoting his brand of nationalism, which was in part inspired by Mr Trump, to try and claim political power in capital cities from Pakistan and Japan to Australia, Brazil and Colombia.⁹

How do we build places, spaces, and identities that allow us to connect with our peers through artistic and cultural practices, individually as well as collectively – when our narratives are dominated by elite groups typically interested in isolating and crushing alternatives? How can experimental, critical thought and practices in arts and technology avoid perpetuating, or even counter, this state of entrapment and submission within a proprietorial absolute?

To unpack these questions we look at different types of proprietorial systems and consider their influence on creative forms of production across the fields of the traditional art world and media art culture. We look at how artists are dealing with these issues through their artistic agency: individually, collaboratively, and as part of groups and collectives. We explore the intentions behind the works: their production and their cultural and societal contexts, through which different sets of values and new possibilities are emerging, across the practice of art, academia, and technology, and thus, the world.

This presentation considers Furtherfield’s own ambitions to build fresh new engagements, based on our practised philosophies and radical knowledge production. It reflects on the ways in which influences – such as Situationism and post-Situationist thinking, punk and post-punk, grass-roots activism – are developing and informing our socially engaged arts activism.

Max Haven says, “Creativity is always social because creative people don’t survive except within a social environment. Beethoven was able to write hundreds of pieces of music because he didn’t have to do his own farming, or laundry, or manufacture his own clothing.”¹⁰

No art, concept, action, or vision exists in isolation; this goes the same for technology, history, and activism. Technology gives us access to tools that can change our as well as other people’s lives. But, learning skills and knowledge from both the analogue and technological worlds surely is the best way to move forward.

When new and powerful technologies are developed they tend to reflect the interests and values of those who develop them, whilst impacting many people’s everyday lives. To counter this tendency, Furtherfield has sought to cultivate a critically informed diversity in the conversations and practices surrounding the blockchain development space since 2015. Our intention has been to build networks of resistance to solutionist and technologically deterministic social platforms that seek to gamify and incentivise all social relations. This chapter has reflected on the history of hack value and has described a number of artistic projects and programmes that we have fostered, whilst encouraging a hacker ethos amongst arts participants and audiences. This work encourages people to think about how things are made, why things exist, and in whose interest things serve.

The creation of social and creative contexts on our own terms has always been under threat by those who would lock down on our territories, systems, places, spaces, histories, and consciousness, for their own, non-egalitarian interests. So, adding perspectives that unpack proprietary and proprietorial conditions, and considering their differences and their effects on everyday culture, and how these perspectives relate to artistic agency, felt necessary. In addition, this chapter investigated biopolitical tensions, where the existence of top-down dominance is very much about a proprietorial (sometimes invisible or spectre) arm of the patriarchy. In a sense, critiques relating to the patriarchy have been examined throughout each of the chapters. It is through understanding the proprietorial element that expands our awareness of the ways in which dominance is structurally imposed on all genders, classes, and races. Historically, this goes further back than neoliberalism’s forty-year reign, as discussed already in this chapter and other chapters, in reference to Murray Bookchin’s perspective. Now, we face proprietorial dominance and its biopolitical constraints through networks which have expanded beyond the analogue panopticon.

By jumping into the world of blockchain and bringing to it our already well-researched knowledges and critiques of art, technology, and societal experiences, and with over twenty years of skills developed around networks, platforms, infrastructures, and explorations in decentralization, with communities online and offline. We are well placed to become part of a scary and yet, fascinating, future.

The research I present already describes key plans and intentions on how to proceed into the future, we have been doing it for over twenty years. Furtherfield continues to, and will always advocate for open, playful and critical engagement with people and their technologies, encapsulated in the DIWO process.

And these are shaping our next 3 years of programming developing adventurous digital art and social justice, and hybrid experiences that radiate from these venues, transforming the urban park into a shared arts and research platform where people can explore how they want live in our globally-connected and troubled world, no matter their class. The next step is to learn from this research and build on it.

The last thing I wish to say is that the journey has been worth the struggle. I have made friends with so many radical people with brilliant minds, who are all examining life beyond the inanity of a conformity imposed by the powers that be.

I have realised that it’s really about radical friendships, and a life of a dynamic organisation with a plurality of voices empowered from the margins with community at its heart.

Notes:

Main photo of me presenting was taken by founder of the brilliant Tatiana Bazzichelli founding artistic director & curator at The Disruption Network Lab, Berlin.

The image behind — My Friend Cayla Doll tear down by Benjamin J Borley, Paula Crutchlow & Gareth Foote with MoCC Guide Mikayla version 2.0 at Furtherfield Commons 2015 by Ian Cook, visitor at MoCC Free Market Furtherfield 2015 by Andrew Brand, MoCC Guide Mikayla version 3.0 in process with ethernet cable 2017 by Paula Crutchlow. http://www.moccguide.net/differently-smart-the-evolution-of-mocc-guide-mikayla/

Bibliography

1 Steiner, Hans-Christoph. Floss + Art. Compiled and Edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. GOTO10 in Association with OpenMute. 2008. p. 151.

2 ‘Proprietary Software’, Proprietary Software Definition, TechTerms. Web <https://techterms.com/definition/proprietary_software/>.

3 Goriunova, Olga. ‘Autocreativity: The Operation of Codes of Freedom in Art and Culture’, FLOSS + Art, edited by A. Mansoux and M. de. Valk. Poitiers, France: GOTO 10, in association with OpenMute, 2008. p. 92.

4 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Biopolitical Production. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2003. p. 23-24.

5 Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. Profile Books LTD. 2011. p. 11.

6 Wendling, Amy E. Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation Hardcover. Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. p. 57.

7 Charnley, Kim. Art on the Brink. Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism. Sholette Gregory (author), Charnley, Kim (Editor). Pluto Press, 2017. p. 1&2.

8 The far right is at its strongest since the 1930s, and the media is helping. Guardian. Owen Jones. 3 Aug 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/03/far-right-bbc-lbc-itv-media [accessed 19 September 2018]

9 The Independent. The movement: How Steve Bannon is spreading populist Trump-style politics across Europe. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/steve-bannon-the-movement-europe-populist-nationalism-trump-a8557156.html/ accessed 27 Sept 2018.

10 Ibid

I presented a keynote at the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Thursday May 25th, 2019. The reading from a chapter of … More

Interviews with Working Class Autodidacts Practising in the Field of Media Art, and Activist Art Culture

Interviews with Working-class Autodidacts Practising in the Field of Media Art, and Activist Art Culture.

Introduction

This paper draws from of an autoethnographic study about Furtherfield, London’s longest running centre for art and technology. Since 1996, the organisation has formed alliances with artists, technologists and activists, who have dedicated their lives to learning and updating their skills and practices. The PhD, explores a whole range of histories, themes, artists, platforms, software, networks, critiques, and ideas, going back over twenty years, in relation to Furtherfield, as an international hub that originated on the web, and how now it also a gallery and Commons space, which has been focusing on decentralised and distributed peer-to-peer practices, and seizing and challenging debates about the role of art and technology in society.

Even though I had included a chapter titled Autoethnography As Research Methodology For Networked Artistic Practice, I learned that it was missing a more in-depth study on the subject of being working-class, across the fields of: art, technology and social change. Since the rise of the alt-right and the decision by 52% of UK to vote Brexit. There has been much discussion regarding the working-classes who voted for Brexit, that they were seeking revenge and new alternatives to get their voices heard at whatever cost. What is interesting among the many conversations on this subject is that the working-class voice for pro EU, anti-racist and anti-fascist, is not as visible as today’s thriving identity politics, who tend to sit on the left side of social activism.

I aim to present evidence with an empowering narrative that proves how our radical imaginations are flourishing, and found ways around the static systems of elitism and hegemonic domination over the working classes, and outsiders. Once gathered, these unearthed stories, will cut through, infiltrate and hack, the complacent ‘art, academia and media streams’, and their locked in zones, so we, ourselves with others, can rediscover new routes for cultural emancipation, in the 21^st Century.

The interviewees for this short study, are: artists, curators, hacktivists, and academics, ranging: from Stewart Home, Shusha Niederberger, Jennifer Seaman Cook, Stefan Szczelkun, and Heath Bunting.

The Interviews

Stewart Home

Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose that pastiche the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.

How does it feel to be working class in your practice?

It feels like I’m constantly discriminated against for how I talk, write, think… because the gatekeepers for the institution of art want to treat the white, male, bourgeois culture as being universal. Therefore, when you do not adhere to the norms of a falsely universalised non-universal culture you are generally are not welcome.

How has class and being an autodidact informed your practice and decisions?

Since I view the institution of art and the academic system as defective and only interested in an over specialised and narrow approach to specifically culture but more generally the entire world, and essentially one that is commoditised and in which everything is approached from the backwards perspective of cultural objects being more important than the communities they emerge from, it has led to me taking an oppositional stance to this. On the one hand I want to reflect and buttress the experience of growing up in and still living in a multicultural community; on the other I don’t want to reproduce the classist, racist and sexist culture that is dominant within the institution of art and academia. I also want to avoid fetishizing the making objects or furthering absurd romantic ideologies about so called ‘genius’ – I am however willing to engage with them in order to rebut them. These problems are not issues restricted to culture since they can be found in science and elsewhere too.

How do you think class might be better understood in the cultural sector you work in?

The only way it will be understood is to massively increase the number of working-class participants at the same time as massively decreasing the number of bourgeois participants. Since those who were privately educated and went to ‘elite’ universities are either blind to – or pretend to be blind to – their privileges, removing those privileges is the only way to address class within the cultural and other sectors, such as politics. When someone in the culture industry with a private education and an ‘elite’ university background claims they struggled to get where they are, this should be challenged and contrasted with how much more difficult it is for someone who went to a state school and who didn’t attend an ‘elite’ university to get where they are.

What circumstances led you realise you was an autodidact?

Initially it may have been reading the novel Nausea when I was in my early-teens and having to look up what an autodidact was because I didn’t know. It seemed to me the – and still does – that the author of Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre, like George Orwell and many other writes sometimes presented as being progressive by right-wing hacks, was a bourgeois snob. I’ve never read books alphabetically as the character in Nausea does, and no one with even a tiny modicum of intelligence would do this. The fact I read Nausea in English translation is also an indication I was an autodidact. Other things leading me to realise I was an autodidact included the fact I don’t always know how to pronounce ‘correctly’ – according to those with privileged backgrounds – various words and names within cultural and other discourse (less of an issue for digital natives but definitely one for autodidacts who went through their teens in the seventies and eighties as I did). Likewise, that I research any subject I’m interested in, whereas I find that those who’ve been to ‘elite’ universities assume they have mastered subjects they haven’t properly understood and have no idea they need to apply themselves to acquiring knowledge in an active way.

What does being an autodidact mean to you?

That I’m able to think and learn for myself. I’m not a brainwashed and pre-programmed privately educated product of an ‘elite’ university uncritically reproducing bourgeois values in everything I say or do.

Any other thoughts here….

I prefer thinking to thought, it’s more active! And of course, it is necessary to continually re-forge the passage between theory and practice!

………………………………………………………………………………………..

Shusha Niederberger

Shusha Niederberger, works at HEK. Is an artist, educator, researcher, self-appointed nerd. Lives near Zurich. Research associate for SNF funded research project “Creating Commons”, IFCAR Institute for Contemporary Art Research, ZHDK. Lecturer on contemporary net culture, F+F Schule für Kunst und Desing, Zürich. Curator of educational program HEK Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.

How does it feel to be working class in your practice?

In my practice as art educator and researcher I know two ways of being conscious of me being working class. The first, and this applies mostly on a professional meta level (which means dealing with institutional settings, funding, politics) is feeling different. I think the term habitus is quite appropriate here to describe the difference. I feel often uncomfortable, alienated, mistrusting. Sometimes I have difficulties to read the logic behind proceedings. I often feel that people find me too direct, too loud, too clear.

The second one, in contact with visitors, the non-professionals, I feel very connected – to both them and my field of expertise. I can get things through, I know their world, I can read their faces and expressions. I feel home.

How has class and being an autodidact informed your practice and decisions?

For me it is certainly true that class and autodidact come together. Working class in Switzerland is very common, and it comes with a pride of an excellent system of professional education. So, I did learn a profession. I know stuff, I know it is professional knowledge, I know the working ethics, and I know it is valued generally. This gives me security. And on that foundation, I was able to go on and autodidact myself into internet technologies, artistic research, and arts education. So, being working class is also a fallback security net for me. If that new thing doesn’t work out, I can go back to prepress, to web design. On the other side, my generally positive experiences with autodidacts made me realize I can do anything.

I am proud of being an autodidact on most aspects of my current practice. I am more and more aware how highly unusual my way is, and the qualities that come with that. My decisions are informed by a sense of independence, but at the same time I am very cautious about my limits. My limits are in not- knowing how systems outside of working-class work. Academia for example.

How do you think class might be better understood in the cultural sector you work in?

It should be addressed directly and named clearly. Class is a category I started to understand and explore only recently myself. Nobody talks about class in Switzerland, officially, there is nothing like class. What we try to address in art education as “cultural participation” should be questioned in terms of class.

What circumstances led you realise you was an autodidact?

The working-class term for autodidact in German is “Quereinsteiger” – the one who arrives from the side. DeepL translates it as “lateral entrants”. For me lateral entries were always the most direct and fastest way to get somewhere. But honestly, I often followed instinct and opportunities. And instinct never told me to go back and get high school graduation.

I work in fields that existed until recently only by ways of autodidacts. Only recently the system has started absorbing it and wrapping all kind of educational curricula and ETCS points around it. Probably it’s time to move on 😉

What does being an autodidact mean to you?

freedom. a way of existence.

being transdisciplinary avant la lettre.

being myself while evolving.

being inventive.

Any other thoughts here….

Being an autodidact is a way of refusing the system.

………………………………………………………………………………………..

Jennifer Seaman Cook

Jennifer Seaman Cook is a transnational American Studies scholar, writer, and documentary media maker. Working at the intersections of politics and poetics, she specializes in visual and public cultures, cultural and social movements, and media and technology studies. Her most recent essays can be found in 3:am Magazine, Pop Matters, Salon, and Heide Hatry’s photography book Not a Rose. Jennifer’s poetry and hybrid cultural history has been published in Berfrois, Cedilla Literary Journal (archived at University of Montana), Queen Mob’s Tea House and more.

How does it feel to be working class in your practice?
In both academia and museum work this has been executed through contingent labor contracts and is alienating. I find my outlet through freelance, which gives my precarious cognitive labor some sense of futurity. It also allows me to seek funded work by the project where, little support is available in my contracted positions.

How has class and being an autodidact informed your practice and decisions?

I understand that I need to come into this being given very little epistemological mentorship or training. I have to come bringing the value expected of me from middle class structures I have not had access to, which I had to draw from my autodidact self-extractions and networking. I have been to academic conferences in the Digital Humanities where this is openly discussed as normal, where it is expected that interns need to have the skills to be brought onto the projects at the undergraduate level! As a graduate student this has been disheartening, and my outspoken nature against this has both outcast me and sharpened my network, my community, precisely.

How do you think class might be better understood in the cultural sector you work in?

Class in synonymous with access, expectation, epistemology, discourse, and skill level in the arts cultural sectors of academia and museums. This strange ‘pay-to-play’ factor expects you to show up as an already-ready-already extractable product and is biased towards embodiment. I’d argue that it’s not enough to make up for it by being an autodidact of the cunning cognitariat. There is a profound misunderstanding, or rather, classed bias in the notion of putting time in or ‘boots on the ground’-ism equated with putting in the cognitariat work but also being able-bodied, healthy and wealthy enough to also show up to extra hours and events to get noticed and advance. A lot of less visible, creative, networked cognitariat work gets absorbed by salaried employees who absorb, exploit, or are otherwise unconscious of the work of the autodidact working class within these institutions (museums, academia especially).

What circumstances led you to realise you was an autodidact?

That it was the only way to get ahead in public school, and then university on my earned partial scholarship. There weren’t mentors. When I got sick, or one tear when I was in a car accident, professors wouldn’t schedule hours to catch me up. Graphic design classes assumed you should know the software. Everything seemed to run on resources that were nowhere to be found. In fact, you were paying the balance to teach yourself with your student loan and one or two part time jobs.

What does being an autodidact mean to you?

Survival. Spydom.

Any other thoughts here…

Learn it. Turn it inside out.

………………………………………………………………………………………..

The next two are directly copied from emails.

Stefan Szczelkun

Born in London post WW2 of displaced working-class parents Stefan grew up in the suburb of Shepperton. He studied architecture at Portsmouth before joining the Scratch Orchestra. Had some success as an author in the UK and USA with three books on our basic life supports: Survival Scrapbooks: Shelter, Food and Energy. Whilst at college he ran the Portsmouth Arts Workshop after being inspired by the Drury Lane Arts Lab and came in contact with leading experimental artists of the day, including Cornelius Cardew and The Scratch Orchestra. Then researched the elements of human ability whilst working with New Dance Collective and wrote for their magazine. Much later this work was published as Sense – Think – Act.

Subject: Stefan Re: PhD questions…

To: Marc Garrett <marc.garrett@furtherfield.org>

Hi Marc,

I’m not strictly an autodidact as I went to a lower-class Architecture School at Portsmouth in 1966 with two E passes at A level. (Later I did an MA at Maidstone and a PhD at RCA!)

Apart from that:

It feels like the mainstream cultural institutions are not for the likes of me and wouldn’t welcome me into their operation as a consciously working-class artist. I see them as the class enemy and I find it Very annoying they continue their cultural psych-ops with little or no critical challenge with regards to class and culture.

I do not relate well to academia which I see as the enemy (J)

Look at the history of Humanism and the university; it is integral to state functioning.

So, I try to think (including making art) for myself outside of those contexts and outside of mainstream publishing (which I see as the enemy of working-class artists and intellectuals, as is education in general – yes that is the enemy too!)

Class should be understood… ~RAGE~

Working-class people should get their share of the taxes that go to pay for culture made and shown on our own terms. Our own artists, commissions, curators, places etc. The bourgeois class has plenty of money to pay for their own shit.

I was an ‘autodidact’ (or autonomous thinker?). When I realized what I did was always different from the ‘Norm’.
As I said I’m not an autodidact. To me It means someone who has educated themselves and is not sullied by school, college, high art etc.

It’s hard to think about this because it evokes such strong feelings of exclusion and injustice. Our knowledge is not built with the means to process such strong emotions that the throwing off of oppressions entail. We need an oral process to do that.

(Please take care quoting out of context! unless anon.)

Best

Stefan

………………………………………………………………………………………..

Heath Bunting

Heath Bunting’s main work, The Status Project, involves using artificial intelligence to search for artificial life in societal systems. Politically he can be described as an imperial dissident. Aside from this, he is currently training artists in security and both in-door and out-door survival techniques so they can out-live organised crime networks in the coastal forest during the final crisis. He is also the immoderator of implausible denial lobbying list.

What circumstances led you realize you was an autodidact?

when i started teaching computer science to my teachers when i was 13

What does being an autodidact mean to you?

repeatedly failing to find a mentor

Where in society do think being an autodidact is and can be useful?

best positioned on the edge of society as a critic and reformer

Any other thoughts here…

how about employing me?

i have a new project called implausible denial i have a mailing list of 12,000 uk politicians that i subject to anti-imperial propaganda

………………………………………………………………………………………..

Conclusion

All participants above are well versed in surviving the social constructs built around them, but not necessarily built for them. My own personal artistic and activist journey has usually involved being outside of institutional frameworks. The irony is, many of those whom I have been intellectually stimulated by have tended to be academics themselves. This includes: Judith Butler, Richard Barbrook, Gabrielle Coleman, Mark Fisher, N. Katherine Hayles, Guy Debord, McKenzie Wark, Donna J. Haraway, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Stewart Home, Mary Shelley, Murray Bookchin, Sadie Plant, Michel Foucault, Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, Kathy Acker, as well as new critical thinkers, techies and artists. Throughout the whole PhD, is the spirit of autodidactism and that self-education is a drive that has pushed Furtherfield, as having agency in the world.

In fact, I have a history of self learning,

“for nearly a year I managed to pretend I was going to school, whilst hiding concerned letters from the headmaster sent to my parents about my regular absence. I would enter the library seeing all the different kinds of people, of all ages researching, reading the abundance of books, accessible to anyone. It also had a small cafe then which was not much of a deal, but going there for breaks in between reading about art, technology, science, religion, sociology and politics etc, helped to create a certain sense of self-assuredness. Sitting in the cafe I would overhear adults discuss what they were reading. I learned a lot about the inquiring minds of other human beings and felt that I was a part of something that until then, was a hidden secret.”^[1] (Garrett 2011)

The British theorist, Mark Fisher, brought to his writings, personal reflections, illuminating past experiences on punk and post-punk culture, with a critical depth; whilst bringing it forward to make sense in today’s society. Like myself, Fisher was deeply influenced by the politics and music of the late 70s and early 80s, and similar expressions afterwards, such as Jungle and Rave. Fisher managed to write about the personal, philosophical, cultural and political, combined. He regularly discussed and reflected on the experience of growing up while living under the pressures of capitalism in the UK. He describes a generation of young, creative thinkers in the early 80s, where “its leading writers were autodidacts who had not gone to university but who nevertheless were steeped in post-structuralist thought and used to flaunt this in the pages of a music newspaper that was then selling hundreds of thousands of copies.”^[2] (Fisher 2016) This history that Fisher discusses is close to my own. For years, until this PhD I have been an autodidact.

Art, which is an autodidact process defined by research and experimentation, actually shouldn’t be taught. Teaching art means transferring existing technical, aesthetic, or conceptual recipes. Teaching art therefore closes options instead of opening them, and defeats the whole idea of forming artists.” (Camnitzer 2015)

People choose to be artists, or be engaged in aspects of arts practice and arts culture, for many different reasons, from many different social contexts, and not necessarily because they went to college or university to study it. This complex assortment of entry points is rarely considered in the mainstream art world, unless when discussing a famous artist. One obvious example is Francis Bacon, who never studied at an art school and had his first professional exhibitions were in his 20s. He was popular with the arts establishment and had work displayed in the Museum of Modern Art. The BBC made two documentaries about his work and life while he was alive, Francis Bacon: Fragments of A Portrait (1966) and Francis Bacon (1988). 20 years after his death, Francis Bacon: A Brush With Violence (2017), also produced by the BBC.^[3] There are strong links between autodidacts, race, class, grass roots culture, and music.

John Lydon, once lead singer of the Sex Pistols, and since 1978 P.I.L, in an interview on a BBC4, documentary, when talking about education, he said

I took every exam that was ever available and I really, really enjoyed it, too. I found education to be not a thing you turn your nose up at and sneer at, but to be an absolute release. But then I always loved books, when I was very, very young I could read and write before I went to school.^[4] (Lydon 2008)

In the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s I played in bands, and regularly watched bands play. For me, music was not separate from art, it was art. It was not only myself who felt this. You only need to look at Cabaret Voltaire’s early releases, out of Sheffield. Claiming artistic agency is not only about asking questions about art, as a medium, or as a culture, but also how one’s ideas link up with others in society. It can extend through one’s own creative practice. Gavin Butt in, Post Punk: Then and Now, says ‘Playing in a band, being part of a broader collective was then – at least as Lycett understands it – a strategic move to escape the entropic pull 70s culture and society.’^[5] (Butt 2016)

I have met many practicing in the field of new media art, defining themselves as autodidacts. We need fresh perspectives on this societal issue and by connecting up with other working-class practitioners, whom are also engaged in Postdigital contexts, it will add crucial knowledge, with new narratives that have been typically hidden from public art and media discourse. However, this is not necessarily about who is an autodidact, it concerns a recognition that working-class creative production exists and that it currently does not have a voice.

^[1] Garrett, Marc. How a Library Saved My Life. Furtherfield. 07/02/2011

http://archive.furtherfield.org/blog/marc-garrett/how-library-saved-my-life

^[2] Fisher, Mark. 2016. Post-Punk Then and Now Paperback. Eds. Clayton, Eshun, Gartside, Butt, and Fisher, P. 14. Repeater.

^[3] McNeil, T.K. (2017) ON BEING AN AUTODIDACTIC. The artist unleashed. http://www.theartistunleashed.com/blog/on-being-an-autodidactic-by-tk-mcneil

^[4] Reynolds, Simon. (2008) Rip It Up and Start Again. FOOTNOTES FOR RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN: POSTPUNK 1978-1984. http://ripitupfootnotes.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/footnotes-2-chapter-1-public-image.html

^[5] Butt, Gavin. (2016) Being In a Band. Post-Punk Then and Now Paperback. Eds. Clayton, Eshun, Gartside, Butt, and Fisher, P. 61-62. Repeater.

Interviews with Working-class Autodidacts Practising in the Field of Media Art, and Activist Art Culture. Introduction This paper draws from … More

Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems interview: with Artists, Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams

The mainstream art world has been locked into its own proprietorial* systems for years, closing down possibilities for emancipation in the arts. It is clumsy and out of date. Cultural evolution and its expansion is stunted by a complex blend of: conservatism, colonialism, imperialism, conformity, and submission to market dominated directives, which unfortunately lead to an art context ruled by neoliberal agendas. The recent appointment of Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert Murdoch, to the Arts Council England’s National Council reinforces this impression.*

“The cultural and creative sector “significantly excludes” those from working class backgrounds, which is in addition to barriers faced by women and people who identify as disabled or Black and minority ethnic (BME), new research finds.”[1] And, “The report also finds the creative industries are mostly upper middle class and with very different cultural tastes from the rest of the population.”[2] This is a massive problem.

In these interviews with artists, Gretta Louw, Antonio Roberts & Annie Abrahams I hoped to explore how their critical practices working with new media technologies differentiate themselves from other art world practices. How do they understand the relationship between art and freedom. What values do they explore in their work.?

Interviews

Marc Garrett: Does a divide between media arts culture and the already established, traditional art systems, exist, if you think this correct what do you think has created this divide?

Gretta Louw:

I think one of the biggest issues is the commercialism of the traditional art systems vs the anti-commercialism of a lot of media art. Perhaps another aspect of the same issue is the lack of viable commercial options for media artists to pursue.

I do think another issue is related less to the art side of things but the media aspect. The Internet has developed according to a Freemium sort of model, and people expect everything to be free on-line, and I have long wondered whether this leads to a perceived degradation of the importance of on-line culture. It is seen as more throwaway than traditional art forms. I wonder whether this springs more out of the attitude that has developed towards the digital as something that is not really ‘real’, that is ephemeral, and easily accessible/disposable.

Antonio Roberts:

Media Arts/New Media/Digital Art (or whatever you want to call it) goes against a lot of what traditional art systems represent. In Media Arts ownership an idea is often shared amongst a group of people, importance is rated on contributions to a community or cause over charisma, and, quite often, the creative output in media arts is not a physical object which can be owned, traded or sold.

All of this is scary, especially considering the long history of traditional art systems, so I can see why there would be a reluctance to adopt new practices

Annie Abrahams:

I see a lot of different reasons : Media arts culture is based on the idea that new media bring about a new art domain. It has been preoccupied with and fascinated by the means, the technology and its possibilities and not so much with what kind of specific aesthetic experience that brought about. So media arts culture never got grounded very well as art. Partly because art historians and critics didn’t know how to or want to look at it, but also because there was and is aesthetic disdain by a lot of media art practitioners.

The art world is a conservative world that doesn’t let others in easily, than professionals. A way to judge that professionalism is by a diploma of an art school. Art school were very late to introduce media art in their curricula, mostly because traditional teachers didn’t know anything about it and couldn’t judge it. So this was self-enforcing the not crossing over of the fields.

The art world is in general solipsistic, not concerned with collaboration and exchange. There lives the culture of the individualistic genius. In Media arts you have to be collaborative and you have to exchange – so the “culture” in both domains are different. Media art is closer to science in that respect.

And the last thing I thought of : The art world needs sellable objects, which either we don’t make, or can’t guarantee to stay “alive”. There is certainly more to say about this. Curators and exhibition makers also played a big role by till, maybe until recently, putting together works based on technological and media criteria and not or hardly ever by treating a subject while using media and traditional art in one show. Moreover on festivals works used to be presented in dark, small, often ugly spaces. There was little attention for showing the aesthetic qualities at it’s best.

MG: If you feel and or think it has changed for the better – how and why, and to what degree?

GL: I think media art over the last decades has made HUGE contributions to the broader arts community. A lot of the politically and socially engaged art that we are seeing today across all mediums has been, I think, inspired to some degree by media arts practices that have demonstrated how art can be more participatory, egalitarian, and directly engaged in social justice movements.

That being said, I am also seeing more of a movement towards a commercialisation and co-opting of media art practices by the existing corporate and capitalist interests. This is the imperviousness of the capitalist system; it seemingly always finds a way to co-opt resistance into the system (for example the way that organic food movements are now used by massive, anti-environmental companies like McDonalds to sell more product; buy an organic burger and a salad from Maccas!). I am personally losing some faith in the use of digital tech as a medium through which to critique the progress-over-everything neo-liberal narrative of capital-T Tech.

AR: I do not think it is changed for the better. In my view, Media Arts is trying to gain more relevance by mimicking traditional systems. For example, media arts biennales, prizes and rankings, using technology to create false scarcity. It does mean we, as media artists, are gaining more acceptance into the traditional systems, but these systems are flawed from the outset, so it’s not necessarily a winning situation.

AA: Since the 60s and the last century – not much. Although there are more known artists using technology (it is taught and included in curricula now). And maybe yes, the media art system became more powerful, less underground, alternative (in the 90ties a lot of artist came to the Internet in order to avoid the traditional art world) or almost invisible because practiced in one “obscure” science department somewhere. Nowadays there is a lot of money and manipulation going on through technology based companies and governmental institutions – there is money in media art. Artists somehow facilitating the introduction of technology to the layman and they start to be used for that.

BeyondSpec – performance Beyond (spectacle) – Episode II, Annie Abrahams and Igor Stromajer, 21/02/2014, festival Tropisme, La Panacée Montpellier (screencapture Helen Varley Jamieson).

MG: My study explores aspects of proprietorial systems. If you generally agree on the premise of where I am coming from. What areas in your practice do you feel this needs to change?

GL: As I mentioned above, I am beginning to turn away from a lot of computer/software mediated approaches to making my work. I want to use more heritage techniques, slower methodologies, and things that are outside of the all-encompassing tech obsession.

AR: Related to my previous answer, I think in order to change we need to have a shift away from gaining importance and building a better reputation by associating yourself with large, traditional institutions. This also extends to giving any one large body, whether they be Indie/DIY or corporate, dominance over our practices.

So, questioning whether an artwork is good, because it is judged to be good because it has been exhibited at [insert large institution].

Antonio Roberts performing in front of his art at Furtherfield, Glitch Momentums Opening event, 2013.

MG: Also, if you know of examples you feel where proprietorial systems are being challenged positively (or negatively). let me know.

GL: Well, I think our app project Mirawarri from last year does this to a certain extent; it is about providing fun/accessible/pop-y digital culture tools that are outside of the closed North American system of platforms like, Snapchat and Instagram, filters. It presents a possibility to engage with digital culture through a completely different cultural lens. Examples of how it’s being used: https://www.instagram.com/mirawarri/

Also I’m working on a project at the moment with Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick called Tally, which is a browser extension in the form of a game that basically educates players, in a fun, gamified way, about how and when their on-line activities are being tracked in the background for marketing purposes.

AR: However, new technologies such as the more recent iterations of VR are largely owned by private corporations. Whilst these technologies are accessible int terms of how they can be used and developed on/with, there is the danger that by giving them so much power and investing so heavily in their way of doing VR/AR we will allow them to dominate our work flows and dictate how, what, where, and when we create.

Conclusion

In his book, The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale, proposes that, educated “citizenship today requires more than an understanding of government, which is just the tip of an iceberg of social organization. It also demands an understanding of the companies that influence our government and culture.”[3] (Pasquale, 2015) Pasquale’s call mainly concerns digital citizens reclaiming a sovereignty over our algorithmic interactions, and their infrastructures. Yet, in regard to art culture, there is a top-down market driven approach that dictates the value of the arts. Think of all the crap and vapid, over produced songs, being shoved into our minds via the music industry’s greed for more and more money, and thus killing any thoughtful and or in depth songs to reach the top of the charts ever again.

Those who are running these top-down orientated, established art magazines and art organizations, and tech-companies, believe in the processes and the canons justifying their privilege. They instinctively build walls around themselves and become untouchable: unless, particular conditions exist where you yourself reflect and or perpetuate similar market driven, neoliberal ideologies. These attributes also convey a dedication towards hierarchy and nationalism, and a self-image where there is strong, cultivated sense of authority, where those accepted as the great and the good are given pride of place for all to admire.[4] (Garrett, 2012) These asymmetrical conditions on the whole are an unquestioned set of defaults, frozen into a psychology in support of the continuation and maintenance of the patriarch. Murray Bookchin proposes that, even before social class emerged that “the priesthood established quasi-political temple despotisms over society, the patriarch embodied in a social form the very system of authority that the State later embodied in political form.”[5](Bookchin 1982)

Just like in the music world, the most interesting, thoughtful and radical art tends to be bubbling under the mainstream carnival of emptiness and utterly mindless drivel. Whenever I go to galleries, they rarely reflect: art, ideas, and contexts beyond their own safe box of canons. Like Pasquale proposes in respect of citizenship, we need the same in the art world. But, also we need to address this notion that technology is the be all and end all. It’s not.

1&2. Working class people ‘significantly excluded’ from arts careers. Artsprofessional. April 2018. https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/working-class-people-significantly-excluded-arts-careers

3. Pasquale, F. (2015) The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press.

4. Garrett, Marc. (2012) Disrupting The Gaze: Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery. Academia. https://www.academia.edu/3310901/Disrupting_The_Gaze_Art_Intervention_and_the_Tate_Gallery?auto=download

5. Bookchin, Murray. (1982) The Legacy of Domination. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Cheshire Books, Palo Alto. P.120.

*Notes:

The meanings of the words proprietorial and proprietary are closely linked. Proprietary is defined as meaning that one possesses, owns, or holds the exclusive right to something, specifically an object. For instance, it can be described as something owned by a specific company or individual. In the computing world, proprietary is often used to describe software that is not open source or freely licensed. Examples include operating systems, software programs, and file formats.[5] Many involved in the Free and Open Source Software movement, share a set of values built around its beliefs against proprietary control over our use of technology. Olga Goriunova argues that, software is not only bound to objects but also includes social relations and it’s about breaking away from the fetishism of proprietary software structures, and “commodification of social processes layered into software production and operation.”[6] (Goriunova 2008)

However, if we consider the definition of proprietorial, in the Cambridge Dictionary, it is especially poignant when it says “like an owner: He put a proprietorial arm around her.” This brings us directly to a biopolitical distinction. The term biopolitics was first coined by Rudolf Kjellén, (who also coined the term geopolitics)[7] (Markus 2015) and then later expanded upon by Michel Foucault, arguing that certain styles of government regulate their populations through biopower. Hardt and Negri developed Foucault’s ideas saying “Biopower is a form of power that regulates life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it.”[8] (Hardt and Negri 2001)

Garrett, Marc. (December 2018) Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems. Researchvalues2018.
https://researchvalues2018.wordpress.com/2017/12/18/unlocking-proprietorial-systems/

———————————

“The appointment of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth Murdoch to Arts Council England’s National Council is not only deeply troubling, given her close ties to the Murdoch corporate empire, but is also a glaring example of how nefarious the UK arts establishment has become. The appointment of ex-Tate boss Sir Nicholas Serota as Chair of Arts Council England has clearly ushered in a new era of favouritism and nepotism in which a tiny select elite grease the palms of each other and their friends and family. Just look at the biographies of the other members of the National Council.

The appointment of Elisabeth Murdoch is directly linked to Sir Nicholas Serota’s current leadership of Arts Council England and to his wife, Teresa Gleadowe’s own arts projects. There are numerous connections, of which only some will be touched upon here. But first let’s remember that during Serota’s reign at Tate, he supported artwashing in the form of BP sponsorship, refused to recognise unions, privatised staff positions, introduced the use of zero hour contracts, presided over a culture of widespread bullying, privatised information, and, of course, Tate staff were then asked to kindly chip-in for a new boat for his leaving present! Serota’s leadership of Tate lasted 28 years.” COLOURING IN CULTURE. Elisabeth Murdoch’s appointment to Arts Council England National Council is a corporate takeover of the arts – a takeover facilitated by Sir Nicholas Serota and his wife Teresa Gleadowe December 15, 2017. http://colouringinculture.org/blog/murdochserotacorporatetakeover

The mainstream art world has been locked into its own proprietorial* systems for years, closing down possibilities for emancipation in … More

To the Lords of Google Earth

Marc Garrett performs an updated version Gerrard Winstanley’s ‘A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England’ originally published in 1649, at Transmediale 2018, Berlin. Winstanley was one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers. The group occupied public lands that had been privatised by enclosures. Garrett proposes that True Levellers or Diggers, and later the Luddites, were hacktivists in their own times, and we can still learn from their ideas, intentions and imaginative maneuvers against top-down domination by neoliberal elites whether it involves technological and or physical contexts.

#01 bookmark | Tell It Like It Is: transmediale 2018 Opening Rally (Really)
Wed, 31.01.2018 19:00 – 20:30
Auditorium Special event
Marie-Luise Angerer Rasmus Fleischer Alex Foti Marc Garrett Goo Goo Muck Analytics Max Haiven Nina Power Bernd Scherer Sergey Schmidt Penny Travlou Jillian C. York
https://2018.transmediale.de/program/event/the-opening-re-ally-telling-it-like-it-is

Marc Garrett performs an updated version Gerrard Winstanley’s ‘A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England’ originally published in 1649, at Transmediale 2018, Berlin.

Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems – Presentations & Workshops 2017-2018

I’m doing a series of presentations in relation my paper Unlocking Proprietorial Systems, from a chapter of my autoethnographic PhD research. It will be in the form of presentations and workshops, exploring how this learned knowledge can be used in ways that enhance and or bring about social and cultural change.

In it I ask if we can build fresh, independent places, spaces and identities, in relation to our own artistic and cultural practices individually and collectively – when the dominant narratives handed down to us via neoliberal elites, are typically in favour of their markets and technologies?

Does this mean artistic and cultural endeavours along with creatively led technological practices, are locked in a perpetual state of submission within a proprietorial absolute?

Garrett proposes that, in order to get around these locked systems we need to rediscover and reclaim our own narratives again. To do this, we need to reconnect to ‘older stories and histories, and new paths’ at the same time.

It means going back as far as The Diggers and The New Levellers, to rediscover the spirit of why we need to reclaim who we are, today. As well as looking at how artists, thinkers, activists, and hacktivists, can build grounded, social, artistic, and cultural, contexts in their own, and or collective terms.

It investigates what values will arrive and continue to exist as useful and in-tune, with our chosen states of autonomy in the 21st Century. ‘Unlocking Proprietorial Art Systems’ is about allowing all human creativity to be as free as free software.

It explores different forms of technical, social and permacultural hacking, off-grid, and alongside digitally networked critically informed adventures and initiatives. It includes ideas in relation hack values, artists hacking Infrastructures (on-line and off-line), Post-Situationist games, and Furtherfield’s recent, radical publication ‘Artists Rethinking the Blockchain’, as concrete examples in how to proceed in unlocking proprietorial systems.

Dates Places of workshops and Presentations

At each venue, the presentations/talks/workshops will be adapted in accordance to the context of the paper proposed, and an acknowledgment towards the methodology of the autoethnographic process.

IRL to URL. BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. 24 – 25 November 2017. Leading a workshop in the practical advice session. What are the advantages and pitfalls to creating a virtual identity? http://bit.ly/2xdLPg0

transmediale/festival – face value. 31.01.—04.02.2018 HKW, Berlin. (TBC)
RESEARCH VALUES. Unlocking Proprietorial Systems – https://transmediale.de/

I’m doing a series of presentations in relation my paper Unlocking Proprietorial Systems, from a chapter of my autoethnographic PhD … More

Autoethnographic PhD of Furtherfield and DIWO Culture

I have just finished Chapter 3 of my PhD, and it’s called ‘DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Co-creation and Decentralizing Artistic Practice’. In its original form it (still) exists as a peer reviewed published paper for the SEAD: White Papers, in 2013. [1] The new refreshed version has been quite a journey. Not only because of writing the thing it, but also because I continue to be deeply involved with Furtherfield, whether this includes activities in running the organisation, or being its main editor, or curating exhibitions, and being engaged in other projects. I’m also teaching on top of this. Which means I have three jobs including the PhD. However, I’m glad I wrote it and feel that this new version offers a wider context of what DIWO offers. And yes, building your own creative and social contexts on your own terms and collaboratively with others, is definitely worth it.

A snippet of the intro…

“This chapter asks, what are the roots, motives and philosophies behind the growth of and interest in DIWO practices, and what are its links to DIY culture, the independent music scene, art culture, networked art, media arts and the politics of social change? To answer these questions the study looks at artists involved in DIWO style activities as well as related projects, their themes and motivations. As with the rest of the PhD this chapter is autoethnographic. It draws on personal files and Furtherfield documentation, as well as academic texts by others, referencing early and recent projects, events, activities in DIWO production. It presents where and how DIWO changes traditional artistic power relations, through curatorial, and co-creative practices; how by its situation in the World Wide Web it impacts authorship and ownership of the creative process; and the narrative and other associative connections to the collaborative art making experience. We look at the spirit of DIWO practice as initiated by Furtherfield and its legacy through examples of different approaches around the world.”

So the next step is to rewrite Chapter 1 for my PhD, called ‘Building Artistic Platforms and Venues In the Networked Age’. It of course will change but, “The first chapter presents the sociality and networked structures that have linked Furtherfield’s community together since it began on the Internet. It shows a mix of varied practices facilitated through Furtherfield’s digital platforms, in relation to art, technology, and social change. It takes us through a timeline of projects, the online neighbourhood with its digital communities for co-creation and its various platforms built in collaboration with the community. The chapter also presents the two gallery phases, the HTTP Gallery and the recent Furtherfield Gallery, within the park, in Finsbury Park, and then the Furtherfield Commons, which is also situated in the same park.”

“It traces some of Furtherfield’s on-line based artistic, projects and their technical developments. It also revisits Internet trends that over time have influenced the community’s relationship with its users and networked culture, such as the big shift from HTML to Web 2.0 based social networking platforms, Youtube, Google and Facebook. And it examines what it means to be, when you are part of an independent, digital community used to making its own D.I.Y software art, digital tools, and online platforms. It also discusses aspects of Hack Value inspired by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation and how Furtherfield is an existing living example of what an alternative culture looks like in contrast to the dominant top-down economic driven culture of neo-liberalism. It explores artworks, pioneering projects and hacking tendencies with and without technology, and argues that hacking has been with us a long time before our use of computers.”

[1] Garrett, Marc. DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Artistic co-creation as a decentralized method of peer empowerment in today’s multitude by , 2013, published by SEAD: White Papers. https://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/diwo-do-it-with-others-artistic-co-creation-as-a-decentralized-method-of-peer-empowerment-in-todays-multitude-diwo-do-it-with-others-artistic-co-creation-as-a-decentralized-method-of-pe/

I have just finished Chapter 3 of my PhD, and it’s called ‘DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Co-creation and Decentralizing Artistic Practice’. In … More

Presentation: Furtherfield and Contemporary Art Culture – Where We Are Now

The paper was an early draft of what is now called Furtherfield and Contemporary Art Culture – Where We Are Now.

Summary

Marc Garrett reflects on Furtherfield’s role and direction as a rhizomatic arts collective. He argues that the mainstream art world is becoming less relevant in contemporary life. He presents a selection of artworks, projects and events shown in their public gallery in Finsbury Park over the past 2 years and discusses Furtherfield’s new lab space, the Furtherfield Commons. This presentation was given at the ICA, London and to students at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester.

Here is the Introduction. To read the rest visit here – http://bit.ly/IQuuAK

For over 17 years Furtherfield has been working in practices that bridge arts, technology, and social change. Over these years we have been involved in many great projects, and have collaborated with and supported a variety of talented people. Our artistic endeavors include net art, media art, hacking, art activism, hacktivism and co-curating. We have always believed it is essential that the individuals at the heart of Furtherfield practice in arts and technology and are engaged in critical enquiry. For us art is not just about running a gallery or critiquing art for art’s sake. The meaning of the art is in perpetual flux, and we examine its changing relationship with the human condition. Furtherfield’s role and direction as an arts collective is shaped by the affinities we identify among diverse independent thinkers, individuals and groups who have questions to ask in their work about the culture.

Here I present a selection of Furtherfield projects and exhibitions featured in the public gallery space, we have ran in Finsbury Park in North London for the last two years. I set out some landmarks on the journey we have experienced with others, and end my presentation with news of another space we have recently opened (also in the park) called the Furtherfield Commons.

Running themes in this presentation include how Furtherfield has lived through and actively challenged the disruptions of neoliberalism. The original title for this presentation was ‘Artistic Survival in the 21st Century in the Age of Neoliberalism’. The intention was to stress the importance of active and open discussion about the contemporary context with others. The spectre of neoliberalism has paralleled Furtherfield’s existence, affecting the social conditions, ideas and intentions that shape the context of our work: collaborators, community and audience. Its effects act directly upon ourselves as individuals and around us: economically, culturally, politically, locally, nationally and globally. Neoliberalism’s panoptic encroachment on everyday life has informed Furtherfield’s own motives and strategies and, in contrast with most galleries and institutions that engage with art, we have stayed alert to its influence as part of a shared dialogue. The patriarch, neoliberalism, de-regulated market systems, corporate corruption and bad government; each implement the circumstances where us, everyday people are only useful as material to be colonized. This makes us all indigenous peoples struggling under the might of the wealthy few. Hacking around and through this impasse is essential if we are to maintain a sense of human integrity and control over our own social contexts and ultimately to survive as a species.

“The insights of American anarchist ecologist Murray Bookchin, into environmental crisis, hinge on a social conception of ecology that problematises the role of domination in culture. His ideas become increasingly relevant to those working with digital technologies in the post-industrial information age, as big business daily develops new tools and techniques to exploit our sociality across high-speed networks (digital and physical). According to Bookchin our fragile ecological state is bound up with a social pathology. Hierarchical systems and class relationships so thoroughly permeate contemporary human society that the idea of dominating the environment (in order to extract natural resources or to minimise disruption to our daily schedules of work and leisure) seems perfectly natural in spite of the catastrophic consequences for future life on earth (Bookchin 1991). Strategies for economic, technical and social innovation that fixate on establishing ever more efficient and productive systems of control and growth, deployed by fewer, more centralised agents have been shown conclusively to be both unjust and environmentally unsustainable (Jackson 2009). Humanity needs new strategies for social and material renewal and to develop more diverse and lively ecologies of ideas, occupations and values.” [1] (Catlow 2012)

It is no longer critical, innovative, experimental, avant-garde, visionary, evolutionary, or imaginative to ignore these large issues of the day. If we as an arts organization, shy away from what other people are experiencing in their daily lives and do not examine, represent and respect their stories, we quite rightly should be considered as part of an irrelevant elite, and seen as saying nothing to most people. Thankfully, there are many artists and thinkers seriously taking on these human themes in their work in various ways, on the Internet and in physical spaces. So much so, this has introduced a dilemma for the mainstream art world regarding its own relevance, and whether it is really contemporary anymore.

Furtherfield has experienced in recent years a large-scale shift of direction in art across the board. And this shift has been ignored (until recently) by mainstream art culture, within its official frameworks. However, we do not only need to thank the artists, critical thinkers, and hackers and independent groups like ours for making these cultural changes, although all have played a big role. It is also due an audience hungry for an art that reflects and incorporates their own social contexts, questions, dialogues, thoughts and experiences. This presentation provides evidence of this change in art culture, and its insights flow from the fact that we have been part of its materialization. This is grounded knowledge based on real experience. Whether it is a singular movement or multifarious, is not necessarily important. But, what is important is that these artistic and cultural shifts are bigger than mainstream art culture’s controlling power systems. Make no mistake, this is only the beginning and it will not go away. It is an extraordinary swing of consciousness in art practice forging other ways of seeing, being, thinking, making and becoming.

Furtherfield is proud to have stuck with this experimental and visionary culture of diversity and multiplicity. We have learned much by tuning into this wild, independent and continuously transformative world. On top of this, new tendencies are coming to the fore such as re-evaluations and ideas examining a critical subjectivity that echo what Donna Haraway proposed as ‘Situated Knowledges’ and what the Vienna based art’s collective Monochrom call ‘Context Hacking’. Like the DADA and the Situationist artists did in their time; many artists today are re-examining current states of agency beyond the usually well-promoted, proprietorial art brands, controlling hegemonies and dominating, mainstream art systems.

Presentation at De Montfort University (UK) in 27th Nov 2012. There is also a video here http://t.co/2gU4WtDvDI that they kindly produced. About 40 minutes, slightly cut short due to battery running out! So, unfortunately the Q&A session is not there which was very interesting.

The paper was an early draft of what is now called Furtherfield and Contemporary Art Culture – Where We Are … More

Hack Value (Draft 2013)

(This is a draft of Hack Value – it will be updated and extended with more text and edits very soon)

“We must allow all human creativity to be as free as free software”[i] (Steiner. 2008)

Introduction

The term hacking has been around for a long time. I almost hesitate to use the word. But, until another word transcends it I will continue to use it. Nonetheless, as this text delves across and into different fields of creative thought and critical practices in art and hacking. I suspect we will get closer to fresh ways in thinking and enacting situations that will open up different beginnings of venturing beyond the word itself.

This study investigates contemporary art and cultural activism in terms of Hack Value. It explores artworks, innovative projects and hacking tendencies with and without technology. It argues that hacking has been with us a long time before our use of computers. A characteristic all hackers share whether it is legal or illegal is to break into or through machined and walled up systems. Indeed, it could be argued that resistances, rebellions, uprisings and revolutions share similarities to hacking. They are all social and cultural hacks against, closed, dominant and reigning systems. By examining social and cultural hacks, technical and non-technical, and observing the similarities shared to overturn existing concepts and established modes of representation.[i] We can ensemble a set of processes not specific to technology alone, but towards a creative and ecological context that informs a flexible, contemporary and trans-disciplinary art practice.

Hack Value can be a playful disruption. It is also maintenance for the imagination, a call for a sense of wonder beyond the tedium of living in a consumer, dominated culture. It examines crossovers between different fields and practices, in relation to their achievements and approaches in hacking rather than as specific genres. Like in other chapters some of the artworks and projects exist in their own right, and within and outside of a museum or gallery context. Other examples either play with or disrupt situations through cultural enactments of communication with others; these include publications, farming, food distribution and public heritage sites. All the projects and works studied are social. Some are political and some are participatory. This includes works that use digital networks and physical environments as well as printed matter. What binds these examples together is not only the adventures they initiate when experimenting with other ways of seeing, being and thinking. They also share common intentions to loosen the restrictions, distractions and interactions dominating the cultural interfaces, facades and structures in our everyday surroundings. This relates to our relationship with food, tourism, museums, galleries, our dealings with technology, belief systems and community ethics.

By looking at the social settings, connections, intentions and the spirit of these hacks, we will get closer to what we can call Hack Value. It examines different instances of hacking that contest the general assumption that hacking is about technology alone. It asks what it means to transfer hacking skills and its connected values of free and open culture into physical environments, and investigates what this looks like. How would it change our perceptions and understanding of art and does it effect the relationship with the public experiencing this kind of art? What impact would it have on society and the systems dominating contemporary art culture?

In The Curious world of Art and Hacktivism, I refer to Richard Stallman’s[ii] playful display of the term hacker at a lunch with GNU fans in Korea.[iii] Where instead of using two chopsticks he managed to use three in his right hand and successfully picked up a piece of food and placed it into in his mouth. This was demonstrated as Hack Value.[iv] Stallman’s hack with simple chopsticks illustrates to us that it is not always necessary to use technology to hack. At its core, it is about how we approach things.

This study comprises of technological and physical forms of hacking. It also includes aspects and actions of: agency, skill, craft, disruption, self-education, social change, activism, aesthetics, re-contextualising, claiming or reclaiming territories, independence, emancipation, relearning, rediscovering, play, joy, being imaginative, criticalness, challenging borders, breaking into and opening up closed systems, changing a context or situation, highlighting an issue, finding ways around problems, changing defaults, and restructuring things.

Art can produce, distribute and represent aspects of spirituality, aesthetics, and philosophy, social and political life that we cannot grasp in other ways. It can bring us to a point where human agency is its raw material. With this in mind how can we get close to reaching the challenge laid down by Guy Debord, where he proclaimed that art could “cease being a report about sensations and become a direct organization of more sensations. The point is to produce ourselves rather than things that enslave us.”[v] (Debord 1958-69) The struggles the Situationists engaged with in their time still matter now. Even though we are living in the 21^st Century; like the Situationists we are experiencing critical questions on art, activism and politics, but under different conditions. The networked society we live in adds a complexity the Situationists did not have to contend with. An agenda worth reemphasizing at this juncture is the same question I asked in the introduction of An Imaginative Dissent: Art, Technology and Social Change:

How can artists and artists’ groups maintain control over their own imaginative ideas, and fulfil their individual and collective intentions, whilst maintaining critical positions; within the context of a globalised culture where prevailing attitudes fashioned on austerity measures and the economic crisis are now part of our everyday lives?

This study examines different approaches around and through these dominant, neoliberal structures with an attention to networks, and examples of ‘being and doing’ with art and hacking, alongside critical ideas involving activism. All the projects, artworks and instances featured possess particular qualities that are disruptive and subversive. The models, instances and actions included in this text are not to be judged as stylistic or only as political, but as critically motivated expressions demanding something better and deeper, where a connection with our everyday life consists of a heightened sense of humaneness, possessing grounded, social and philosophical sensibilities. It leans towards a radical form of emancipation. One cannot fully cover the range of diverse contributions by groups and movements that enrich and inform this writing, such as DADA, the Situationists and Tactical Media. However, it is necessary to include their influences accordingly.

What separates DADA, the Situationists and Tactical Media from other art and their traditions is their common intent to transform and reclaim through art, cultural situations that challenge aspects of society. Societal context is an integral part of their art practice itself and linked directly with everyday life. The Dadaists deplored what they saw as the dehumanization of humanity through forms of industrial mass production and the rise of mass consumerism. And rejected notions of ‘art for arts sake’, and incorporated an, ‘anti-art’ position where they proclaimed art was inseparable from everyday life: “the implicit question the Dadaists posed for themselves was how to reimagine artistic practice in this age of media and technological warfare.”[vi] (Dickerman 2005)

The Situationists shared a “common commitment to devising innovative forms of art which couldn’t be recuperated by secret police agents, rich collectors, bourgeois critics or cultural bureaucrats.” In essence, Situationism and Tactical Media[vii] owe much to DADA, and Hack Value owes much to all of these critically engaged art practices. Tactical Media and Situationism both include critical theory and engage in strategic thinking. They cross over into academic fields to “expose the complacency and superficiality of much contemporary thought, jump through the same intellectual loop holes and stand up to academic scrutiny.”[viii] (Plant 1992)

Like Tactical Media, Hack Value has no central core or institution defining its purpose or role in culture. It exposes rather than is exposed. It preserves within its kernel the behaviour and strategy of experimentation with alternative technologies in line with nomadic, autonomous and rhizomatic tendencies, while investigating how to find routes into physical and digital spaces. Tactical Media and Hack Value both consist of artists, coders, activist and theorists who are exploring different aspects of hacking. Although, to explore Hack Value one does not need to be involved in Tactical Media practice or its culture. Hack Value argues that the noble hacker tradition that has given free reign to curiosity and digital freedoms can exist in everyday life situations. In the age of neoliberalism much of the debate around hacking in mainstream media and nation states falls into classing hackers as threats to national security, thus labelling them all in one easy term as terrorists. We now need to move beyond the digital to explore and build different networks of resistance, where the dialogues include non-hackers, the public and communities. And yes, it is necessary to continue the struggle against the oppressive digital networks growing that are designed to restrict political and creative freedoms. However, Alexander Galloway puts it well when he says, “The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-luddite delusion, but to push it into a state of hypertrophy, further than it is meant to go.”[ix] (Galloway 2004)

This study also draws upon what Mary Flanagan terms as Critical Play. What Flanagan’s ideas bring to Hack Value, is an understanding of human experience in games culture, where social context is a crucial part of her academic research, alongside a 21^st century, contemporary feminist critique as an artist, theorist and games practitioner. Her dedication for emancipatory situations to occur are prevalent in all her games, where their design from the beginning and their formation, with and without technology include processes and strategies where the participants themselves critique the status quo as part of the game play. Flanagan sees this as playing critically, rather than conforming to the traditional game tropes produced by the patriarchal and mainstream hegemonies dominating games culture. When playing these thought provoking games made by the group Tiltfactor founded by Flanagan; people are invited to ask questions that reflect on their own social conditions and personal experiences in everyday life. “Critical play means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life.”[x] (Flanagan 2009) And, “Critical play is characterized by a careful examination of social, cultural, political, or even personal themes that function as alternatives to popular spaces.”[xi]

There is a presumption that everyone is connected to the Internet when in fact many are still not. This needs to be readdressed. Not by connecting even more people onto the Internet or kitting them out with new technologies. Sure, sharing technological resources to support indigenous and local infrastructure is a honourable ambition. However, teching up environments where it may not be necessary more reflects a western viewpoint. Where the binary of ‘having and not having’ is a prominent condition. Sharing tools with others who do not have them is potentially ethical, sensible and emancipatory. Yet, pushing our own technological templates onto indigenous people’s lives may not be in accordance to their own grounded social contexts, nuances, long histories, beliefs and local systems. In this sense, common people of the world share significant traits and dispositions where hegemony and imperial structures have positioned, top-down ideologies via bureaucratic and political economies, onto already richly formed communities. This commodification of life as Bookchin puts it, “is vitiated by the association of needs with consumption for the sake of consumption…”[xii] (Bookchin 1995) just because our societies value these technological breakthroughs does not mean it works for others.

“When one of the Buddha’s disciples came to tell him, after a long voyage in the West, that miraculous things, instruments, medications, methods of thinking, and institutions had transformed people’s lives since the time the master had retreated into the Mountains, the Buddha stopped him after a few words. Have they wiped out sadness, sickness, old age and death? he asked. No, replied the disciple. Then they might as well have kept still, thought the Master. And he plunged back into contemplation, without bothering to show his disciple that he was no longer listening.”[xiii] (Castoriadis1964-65)

This study also draws upon earlier struggles going back to the 1700s in England when everyday people such as Gerrard Winstanley and others forged a movement known as the Diggers also known as the True Levellers, to reclaim and claim common land from the gentry for communities. All examples and contributions will be argued in the context of hacking, whether from the 1700s, recent history and the present day. If this were a larger study it would include the influential Florentine of the 1600s Niccolo Machiavelli. He believed humans were essentially selfish and his own political tactics and writings have influenced many politicians and even hackers, especially his theory of statecraft. However, this investigation is about the inclusion of those not heralded as officially accepted within a political, cultural hegemony and traditional, mainstream art canons. Some of the individuals and groups referenced may now be well known. But their ideas, work and activities speak in terms that relate beyond supporting hermetically sealed and dominating power systems.

The aim is to introduce a discourse that pulls together innovative tactics and ideas where social and technical forms of disruption are not caught within oppositional conditions, and or situations of violence. On one hand this study considers the reasons for revolutionary actions, desires and related tendencies, on the other it advocates non-violent processes and outcomes by studying alternative possibilities as intuitive, technical and physical forms of contextual and cultural hacking.

[i] Christopher Kelty. Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Durham: Duke University Press. (2008) P. 94. (Referred to by Johan Söderberg. Free Software to Open Hardware: Critical Theory on the Frontiers of Hacking.

Department of Sociology University of Gothenburg. Geson Hylte Tryckt, Göteborg 2011.)

[ii] Richard Stallman. In September 1983, launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project he initiated the free software movement. In October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

[iii] GNU Operating System. http://www.gnu.org/

[iv] Richard Stallman. On hacking. http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html#cracker

[v] Guy Debord. Theses on Cultural Revolution. (1958-69) Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited and translated by Kenn Knabb. 2006. P.53.

[vi] Leah A. Lievrouw. Alternative and Activist New Media. Digital Media and Society Series. Polity Press. 2011. P. 32.

[vii] “Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture.” David Garcia and Geert Lovink. From Alex Galloway’s book, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. From a chapter called Tactical Media. The MIT Press. 2004. P.175.

[viii] Sadie Plant. The Most Radical gesture. The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. Routledge. 1992. Preface Page 1.

[ix] Alexander R. Galloway. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. The MIT Press. 2004. P.206.

[x] Mary Flanagan. Critical Play: Radical game design. The MIT Press. 2009. Chapter 1. P.6.

[xi] (Ibid) P.6.

[xii] Murray Bookchin. The Ecology of Freedom: The emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Black Rose Books. Reprinted 1995. P. 69.

[xiii] The Castoriadis Reader. Chapter: Marxism and Revolutionary Theory (1964-65*): Excerpts. Marxism:A Provisional Assessment. The Historical Situation of Marxism and the Notion of Orthodoxy. Edited by David Ames Curtis. Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. P.169-70.

(This is a draft of Hack Value – it will be updated and extended with more text and edits very … More

Category: Interviews, Articles, Papers, reviews

My Re-Enchantment

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