one more Kurtz post...

It seems that there is no information about Daytona Beach on the CAE web site and very little of substance anywhere else on the web... just a thought.

For Next Week (9/29)

We'll be talking about our next speaker, Hasan Elahi, and the topic of surveillance culture.

Readings are available via links from the course syllabus:
http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/cnm201/

Aside from the substantive reading from Chun, we've included two very short news articles about Elahi and (for fun!) his appearance on The Colbert Report.

Because the next lecture will not take place until Monday, October 13, you do not have to generate and post three blog questions for next Monday. Instead, the questions should be posted before our meeting on 10/13.

Note on Kurtz from September 18th lecture, BAM

Steve Kurtz, of Critical Art Ensemble, identifies the thin range of what is deemed acceptable, normal behavior while partaking in public performances of activities to scenarios that often make more clear the line of civic control. To what publicly challenging performance will the police respond to; where are we self-editing so as to avoid those stand offs with authoritative intolerance?

A more than slightly sardonic Kurtz chides the police, especially in their post 9-11 overly constrictive policies, demonstrating through a string of CAE projects that they are provocateurs in the service of bringing social injustices to the eyes of passersby.

Welcome home, public nuisance.

The Expansion of Consciousness

The critical art ensemble speaks of a twofold expansion of human in consciousness, taking place in paradoxically different ways. One is an expansion outward through electronic and digital communication, a move that deceives the notion of distance. The other is a microscopic contraction, one that gazes inward into the individual components of genetic makeup and tries to engineer new forms. We seem to have a pretty good vocabulary for speaking about the first kind of change: globalization, a term that is weighted by political movements and ideas. I'm wondering if there's a word we need to come up with to describe the second type of expansion. "Evolution" doesn't sound quite right.

Question

CAE is a collective of five tactic media artists dedicated to exploring the intersections among art, technology, critical theory, and political activism. BTW, as an engineer, I can hardly call an art work that was created to blend in certain political view an art work. My question is that:
How do you connect your performance art with those audience who might not have the necessary background to discover your purpose, like me. How do you make your art accessible to these people and make sure they get your message through your radical performance? Or you just don't care about it as long as your art is performed.

I guess I know nothing about modern art. I found it hard for me to even understand some of my classmates' questions. I don't have the apetite to analyze the complicated theories behind it. Among all the questions posted here, mine looks so stupid and weird. Does it make my question some sort of an art work in this blog? Why or why not?

Kurtz

In an interview with Jon McKenzie and Rebecca Schneider, CAE described its own practice as guerrilla. For the dominating power is too strong, and social specilization makes large scale resistence impossible. While I am sympathy with and appreciate the tactics that rely on partical contexts, I am curious is there any long-term goal in CAE’s practice. While talking about utopian is forbidden, I am still wandering where the movement is heading for? Does CAE bracket the question intentionally?

In terms of its pedagogical purpose, I am wondering in which extent the audience will benefit from the contextual critique? Would they miss the big picutre of the society beneath the particularity that you are exposing to them? In other words, when you say “Coke is gone and Pepsi is in power,” if the audience is disenchanted from both Coke and Pepsi through your particular critique, would they be able to see through, say “pepcoke?”

In the Interview, CAE also mentioned that “There are times that appear to be more desirable moments to live in than other times” and our task is to “maintain the open fields that already exist” rather than seek a change in the whole structure, because history shows that is possible. I am wondering if historical circumstances will change the possibilites, make the possible in the past impossible and the impossible possible?

Finally, CAE refused to generalize its audience, for each program has a paricular audience. I am still interested in what kind of audiences you have. Could you give me several examples of your particual audiences?

You contend that your persecution was the result of your stance as an anti-authoritarian content producer.  But while many groups and individuals with equally critical views have not been so strenuously persecuted, the machinery of the state has historically been brought to bear against many individuals who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and suffered the excesses of tenacious bureaucracy.  The tone of your work appears not to be directly threatening to state interests, but rather to corporate ones.  

Given these facts, how certain are you that the efforts directed against you were the result of the critical content of your work and not the result of the dogged ineptitude of officials desperate to produce results in a climate of fear?  Do you expect that the efforts against you would have been different had you been an artist using biological tools to celebrate mainstream ideas about biotechnology (utopian viewpoints) rather than present critical ones?

Scientists are largely neither anti-authoritarian nor producers of cultural content in the course of their work.  To what extent did you feel the chilling effect produced by reports on your work within the academic scientific community were intentional byproducts of the efforts against you.  If intentional, why do you believe this example was presented to mainstream scientists, whose work may have limited critical content, rather than content producers, whose work is often inherently critical?

The role assumed by CAE of artistic criticsm in a technological context often requires the use of non-mainstream media and other (benign) tools that nonetheless invite suspicion.  What precautions do you think can be taken by artists desiring to present minority or anti-authoritarian views to avoid extended persecution?  Or is this simply a risk inherent in criticism from a minority/anti-authoritarian standpoint?

Kurtz & CAE

In Tactical Media Practioners, CAE’s position as a “tactical media practitioner” for resistance is suggested as being forced by the dominant culture rather than a choice. However, choice plays a role in how CAE interacts with its audience and the various avenues it chooses to present its resistance exhibits. It appears, at least through this article, that CAE speaks singularly. How does CAE balance this group dynamic? How does CAE balance the influence of choice amongst its members and the forced actions that individual members may feel? How is compromise achieved in an ensemble that relishes the notion of resistance and autonomy?

As CAE seemingly moves from one resistance movement to another in order “to give enough evidence to show that a given imperative is credible”, what is the response or critical mass it seeks from the public in order to resist another dominant figure? CAE moved from information communication technology and now focuses on the oppression of the state in the realm of biotechnology. What are credible instances of resistance that would force CAE to move onto other domains?

Kurtz & CAE

In its 2000 interview with Jon McKenzie and Rebecca Schneider, CAE advocates being labeled "tactical media practitioners" rather than "artists." In offering rational for the distinction, they note, "the designation 'artists' tends to bring with it the social connotation that they are beyond the labor market, which in turn implies that they identify with their economic superiors... CAE likes 'tactical media practitioner.' This term distances us from traditional ideological categories, and distinguishes us from the specialization of artists who are precious object makers for the luxury market."

To what degree does this labeling effort actually distance CAE from the way art and artists participate in the reproduction of asymmetric power relations between various classes of people? Do you think art's role in these power relations only operates through labor markets and the market for luxury goods? What about the cultural capital required to make terms such as "tactical media practitioners" intelligible? And doesn't CAE still actively participate in larger art worlds, regardless of how they label themselves?

“Model amateurs for public discourse”

Within the practice of visual design, new visual forms are emerging as a way to explore and convey the “paradox of scales” that technology affords us, as we zoom into the body at the molecular and zoom out of the body with digital communication networks (Joselit). How do you/CAE (Critical Art Ensemble) take on new visual forms in investigates the control of technological allowances?

How are we, the non-specialists, coming to know the world differently, through the new visual by bioart-makers?

The preservation of our respective autonomy, in these potential times of losing our physical humanness, the body is the last capital we control until sold off while warding off invasion (CAE). If control is further awakened in technology and wielding greater authority in the biological realm, what is saving our less than ideal parts from the carrying out of eugenic reconstruction?

How is bio-art’s role, in providing a place for questioning of technology, through performance and public participation interfacing with public policy or technology’s management?

CAE and Kurtz

In Critical Art Ensemble article, according to CAE’s argument, artists as “Tactical media practitioner” are fundamentally based on context reading. (p139) However, CAE’s methodological metaphor focuses mainly on a human body and bio-organics. The metaphor is almost closed to de-context and de-situation model with environmental contexts. (installation, CAE said) Although the metaphor represents autonomy contrast to current information community which they criticized, manifesto and metaphor is not converged.

In Biocollage article, biotech seems to one of effective methods to implement CAE’s message such as autonomy inside body immune system. However, as argument of essentialists like Lois Groake, if CAE focuses more on strong methodology to spread the message, especially, artificial biological products, animals, and invasion, CAE is possible to evoke aversion from message-takers. Art is not just based on methodological metaphors. It also needs communicative experiences with appreciators.

As mentioning some of CAE members, sense of human body is coherently related to mind to recognize the body’s existence. Virtual body or robotic body still requires the existence of mind to orient the bodies. However, many CAE projects focus more on replacement performance between artificial body (virtual or robotic) and original body. Without considering the interactive mechanism among plentiful human mind, original physical body, and represented body, the performance is easy to be regarded as shallow.

Kurtz

1. Given CAE's work as an activist / art organization, what similarities do you see between your work and that of the billboard liberation front? In both cases, the primary impetus is to create awareness of ideas which are often missing from the mass media by the unsanctioned appropriation of the tools of industry for use by the artist.

2. What role does craftsmanship play in your artmaking / cultural workings? Is craftsmanship and the process of making the physical object / event an important part of CAE's work?

3. It would seem that the ongoing conflict between copyright holders vs media consumers is a fine example of digital civil disobedience. As opposed to cracking and damaging systems, it is a non-disruptive digital civil disobedience which could explain the lack of mass arrests... This movent seems to have grown not due to ideals of liberty and freedom to work with media but because people could download music for free. With copyright also applicable to newly discovered and created genes, Why doesn't CAE focus more on intellectual property than biotech?

Specialist Discourse, the West, and Speed

In CAE's interview with Schneider and McKenzie, I am struck by the simultaneous rejection of specialist discourses (as it relates to the presentation of one's work) and insistence on strategic terms to designate purpose and political intent. In particular, I am thinking here of CAE's identificatory movement from "artist" to "cultural worker" to "tactical media practitioner," in addition to CAE's valuing of "coalition" over "community." How do these choices of discursive precision diverge from the very notion of specialist discourse that CAE challenges? Furthermore, why is CAE inclined to avoid such historically-laden terms as "artist" and "community?" With respect to the "artist," it seems that CAE assigns him or her to both an aesthetic and economic realm that are separate from politics, but given the inextricability of these social spheres from the political, could we not consider a resignification of these terms rather than a disavowal of their significance? In terms of "community," CAE criticizes the politics of sameness and the danger of such a politics for groups like the "gay community." I wonder if we can't maintain an import on community if only to reconfigure the very system by which we envision it as a breeding ground for sameness; I am thinking here of critical work around the notion of "queer community"—and granted, there are important distinctions between "gay" and "queer"—and the possibility of its formation only as a challenge to more traditional communal forms (Dinshaw). What about the possibilities of community formation across not only space, but also time (Foucault's insistent "affective engagements with the past, for example)? In fact, how does CAE envision discursive resiginification of problematic terms if it excludes such historically-informed terms from its politically inclined vernacular?

CAE declares that underlying its projects is an attempt to "produce work that reveals and/or challenges the authoritarian underpinnings of Western culture" (136). What does CAE mean by "Western culture and what is the significance of CAE's specific opposition toward it? Following this, what is CAE's relationship to the "non-Western?" The problem of invoking the West and, thereby, enacting a linguistic colonization of an othered Orient aside, I wonder why CAE does not overtly declare its challenge to "Eastern" authoritarian underpinnings. Is this challenge avoided because of CAE's configuring of authoritarianism as essentially "Western" and, therefore "Eastern" only insofar as it is inherited from a history of colonialism? Or does CAE's challenge merely indicate a primary engagement with American and European audiences? In fact, what is CAE's understanding of any West/East binary given the transnational realm opened up by ICT and biotechnology?

In CAE's contribution to Biocollage, "Body Invasion and Resistant Cultural Practice," activists are called to enact "intervention in the utopian spectacle of biotech […] as soon as possible" (50). Why is the call to intervene expressed so urgently here? Is the emphasis on urgency merely a quality inherited from a tradition of manifesto-like writing? Or, is the urgency here specific to the temporal immediacy of the possible effects of biotech? In other words, is the call to intervene "as soon as possible" directly related to the speed by which ICT and (bio)technological advancement are realized, and, if so, is this call also a challenge to the notion of speed in the first place? What is CAE's understanding of historical speed—a possible speeding up of time—and how does it imagine both contemplation and action within this history?

Questions for Kurtz

Given that CAE are “tactical media practitioners” instead of being traditional artists, are you consciously designing canvases for bio-organics that you’ve tried to control, or providing a neutral platform allowing any possibility? What are essential focal points of “creativity” when you are adopting biotechnology as a kind of media for criticizing social issues?

When CAE indicates the redundancy of grand tomes of writings and intends to express ideation through relatively “lightened” media that could be accepted by a wider range of audience, how do you value the depth of traditional culture and its sprit of era?

From the theory of taste culture illustrated by sociologist, Thorstein Veblen and Herbert Gans, the types of culture, e.g. popular culture and high culture, are closely related to various social classes. Being a tactical media practitioner, what types of culture you will estimate to create by these projects you have produced?

The Internet – more and more a street for discourse and political action?
The CAE doesn’t directly comment on political action or civil disobedience, but relies on theoretical discussion. The CAE also differentiates between political and pedagogical action. “Pedagogy requires performance, spectacle, and presence,” (CAE). I’m curious, though, how the intersection or lack thereof between political presence and pedagogical action may have changed since CAE’s 2000 TDR interview with McKenzie and Schneider.

The case of the 2008 presidential election immediately comes to mind as a complicated contemporary example of the pedagogy/political binary. Streets themselves are inundated with political propaganda, button pushers and sign wavers. Mass media incorporates blogging and Internet posting as credible and active sources. These sources document street activity and perpetuate theoretical discussion. According to the CAE definition of pedagogy and the discussion of street action in the 2000 interview, election '08 street actions, whether virtual or physical, are still pedagogical in nature since they require “performance, spectacle, and presence.” The difference today, though, is the scope of activity. Today the CAE's description of the street as a "place where the discourse of resistance can be developed...where localized power vectors can be challenged" is complicated with the mass circulation of street activity.

Couldn't mass media documentation of pedagogical street action and discourse directly impact political outcome via media interpretation, polling tactics, political performance practice, and widespread media circulation? If so, how can pedagogical and political action remain separate? Perhaps the still increasing virtual presence in political propaganda makes the separation between politic and pedogogy increasingly problematic.

We can see the interactions between political action, pedagogical discourse, Internet and street activity in the investigation of Steve Kurtz’s work. With the federal investigations of Kurtz’s work, an Internet network of video and newspaper articles exists as documentation of the case and specific government policies involved. Although the viewer is often left to draw his/her own political conclusions, political influences have a clear and direct relation to Kurtz’s artistic work…for better, or for worse. Can theoretical discussions that reference or inspire political action suffice in this circumstance? When it comes to artistic action, should we take the lead of popular blogging culture and the media and begin to mesh political and pedagogical street action in both physical and virtual realms? Is it time to take direct action?

Kurtz

CAE’s model of the Amateur Science Citizen was proposed as a tactical pedagogical strategy that can resist science and its institutions by appropriating scientific practices. This model looks for revealing the political interest that runs under the scientific research usually concealed behind the neutrality of science by opening to the public the knowledge, materials and processes of science. Another characteristic of amateurism is that its’ actions/explorations happen outside the space designated for science. It can happen in a bar, for example, as CAE has shown us. But the amateur has become a dangerous figure. Under the paranoid state that has to account for the millions and millions of dollars spent on the war on terror, the amateur is now associated with terrorism. Terrorists are portrayed in movies as amateurs, someone building bombs in their living room, handling explosives alongside their food, a timer that looks more like an alarm clock, experiments that could happen next door. Terrorists are not only moved by false causes but also they as amateurs, are dangerously initiated in an unknown science. Speaking as a student that works within the academy I would like to explore the idea of amateurism within the academy. Evidently this assertion already carries a contradiction that the academy cannot tolerate. So, how can amateurism be recuperated as a form of learning, exploring and exerting the right to know?

queries for kurtz

Questions from Jen Schradie for Steve Kurtz

Electronic Civil Disobedience – If ECD is a tactic, rather than a strategy, what are other tactics that are on the horizon. What are even newer media formats that you and CAE expect to engage in? Is it possible, given the digital divide, both here and abroad, that the audience for your cultural work is limited? Moreover, does your audience shift and change or do you even have a specific audience?

Political Repression – Other artists have faced political prosecution, such as Paul Robeson and Hollywood creative artists during the McCarthy era. This type of repression has continued throughout the 20th century, such as recently jailed bloggers. At the same time, political prisoners for other types of so-called crimes still fill prisons around the country. For example, Mumia Abu Jamal and those in the Bay Area, such as Marilyn Buck, who were more involved in revolutionary struggles for black liberation. In our reading, the CAE claims to absolve itself from formal political organizations or movements yet the government does not make such a distinction. What do you have in common, if anything, with these other political prisoners? What is different? Some of the same organizations supported your struggle and those of these other political prisoners. Has your view on the importance of organization changed since your persecution? Has your cultural artwork or medium been transformed?

Fame and No Fortune - Despite the feds attack on your work, CAE’s acceptance, awards, and exhibit sites with the mainstream art world has grown, perhaps because of your prosecution. If this is accurate, does this matter vis a vis your art and your relationship to it? How does speaking, commenting, interpreting and explaining your art, i.e. text, via interviews and now a speaking tour interact with the art itself, the medium and the message?

1) If you view the principal goal of your activities as being to foster sites/instances of resistance, do you worry that the public relations efforts undertaken in response to your ordeal have forced you into an authoritarian position--in other words, that they have been designed more to manipulate a passive public sympathy than to facilitate critical engagement with an issue, and that you have been cast as a kind of victimized oracle in order to expedite this manipulation? If so, what strategies have you pursued to reinsert a critical/resistant perspective into your PR campaigns?

(Perhaps more broadly: Do you view the specific cultural/political/economic criticisms you advance (what might be called the "propagandist" element of CAE's activities) as fostering resistance in the same fashion comparable as the "interactive" projects that practice the theory advanced in those criticisms, or do you reserve a certain authority for yourself when contextualizing your works? If the latter, does this strike you as a contradiction in your position, or does it simply corroborate that you are not interested in critique for its own sake?)

2) How would you describe the role of the visual in your biotech projects? If, as you write, the function of "resistant image makers" in the context of biotech should be to "represent the unseen elements of biotechnical developments" via "participatory projects...[undertaken] outside a context overwhelmed by the signs of scientific authority", how do the visual aspects of those projects relate to the process of participating in them? Are they meant to co-opt the practice of "unveiling a discovery" into a more critical or ironic context (the visible results of the litmus test for genetically modified foods; the monetary value of the individual body "displayed" to the participant after a series of experiments), or does the visual fulfill a broader range of functions in this works? Alternately: does the visual not serve a privileged role in these works, instead functioning as merely one of many registers contributing to the affect of your projects?

3) Building on the above: to what extent do you think of your projects in terms of the different registers (visual, tactile, durational, cognitive/problem-solving, etc.) in which your audience relates to them--or to what extent do you think it is critically productive to break your projects down into these different registers? To what extent does such an aggressively non-holistic approach miss the point

questions for steve kurtz

In CAE’s interview with Jon McKenzie, CAE describes community as that which works against a “politics of difference . . . by maintaining a closed social system.” To replace / surpass mobilization as community, CAE calls for the political organizations of “coalition formation.” Although CAE implies a polarization between community and coalition formation—noting the coalition as the “real world” political force—how do these concepts transfer and deploy out to a public that more often than not would consider itself always part of a community that can join, form, participate in various coalitions for a multiplicity of causes. That said, could it be more fruitful to reconsider, firstly, the ontological formations of community as an activist project that has the possibilities and potentials to reconfigure numerous sub-mobilizations, such as coalitions? If community really is a closed social system, then might not CAE itself fall into this unwanted categorization, possessing a technological proficiency that would undoubtedly “work against the possibility of power through diversity”? With proliferations of the effects that reconfigurations of distributed networks invoke upon communications as well as Hardt & Negri’s concept of the multitude, how can we critically think through community, coalition, ensemble—what each currently means and how each currently mobilizes—without discarding concepts that are too historically weighted to abandon?

CAE state that bio art can contribute to the body’s subsumption to capital if it does not foster “resistance.” The difficulties in creating and communicating a resistant visuality with biotechnology seem to reside within what CAE calls the “nonspecialist.” How do resistant biotech visualities communicate to those whose technological knowledge is lacking? For CAE, participatory projects that offer access to “fundamental” sets of data seem best suited for this endeavor. Yet, mainstream practices of art are not necessarily concerned with providing empirical information to their viewers. Can more common notions of art (such as the static art object with no empirical component) provide grounds for a participatory encounter that could prove to be “resistant”? For example, how can the art object of Alba, the GFP bunny designed by Eduardo Kac that fosters a purely aestheticized spectacle of the biological, be considered “resistant”—if at all? What are the other tactics and strategies artists can employ to construct a “resistant” visuality that alludes a direct correlation to empirical data?

The title to CAE’s “Body Invasion and Resistant Cultural Practice” article causes one to consider the juxtaposition of “body” and “resistant.” That is, when enacting a resistant practice against biotechnology, how do we resist our bodies? Resistance implies working against something, and now, in the age of biotechnologies, can we actually resist our own biology? With the collapse of capital into biology, suggestions of resistance become dauntingly complex, perhaps implausible. Resistance against capital is a concept we have, in the past, been able to employ. Now, it seems that to work against capital coupled with biology is an inaccurate formation of cultural practices critically engaged with biotechnological discourses and practices. We are not literally working against the materials we are composed of but working through a networked web of interactions that produce a multiplicity of forces and directions. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have called not for resistance but hypertrophy. What is the body’s contemporary relationship to “resistance”? And how does this relationship (re-)formulate what could be considered a critical intervention into the biotech realm?

Steve Kurtz: Art and Discipline

Post your questions for/about Steve Kurtz as comments here. Please try to have them posted a day before class, so all of us can have a chance to look them over before meeting.

Guidelines for Posting:
Based on either the assigned readings or your own research, as well as how your own interests tie into the speaker's topic, try to formulate three thoughtful and insightful questions that we can use to guide our in-class discussion or that you can pose to the speaker on the night of the lecture.

If you're curious about the kinds of questions suggested in semesters past, you can peruse the many entries archived here on the course blog (including the ones that Kris and I submitted!).