Armchair Politics
Geoff Cox recently joined the University as a Postdoc Researcher in Digital Aesthetics as part of the Digital Urban Living Research Center.
How to begin to speak about the all-encompassing theme of politics and the media? I have decided to play it safe and keep it simple by describing an arts project I have been involved in for Arnolfini, a contemporary art gallery based in Bristol, UK, where I work on an occasional basis as an associate curator for online projects (alongside my research position at AU). I have been producing a number of projects that engage with the politics of participatory media including the release of an online petition platform by Les Liens Invisibles. I will go on to describe this in more detail but first I need to outline the context a little more.
In Autumn 2009, Arnolfini ran a series of projects called 100 Days in the lead up to the 15th UN Conference on Climate Change (COP 15), presenting exhibitions, performances, screenings and debate around issues of climate change, social justice and the contested relationship between art and activism. The season included exhibitions, such as Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files, a research project into Caspian oil geography, Ocean Earth’s Situation Room, presenting various proposals to replace fossil fuels with sustainable alternative technologies, as well as a regular Speakers Corner event in the foyer of the venue for anyone to speak freely in ‘public’.
However, the major part of the season consisted of an invited ‘occupation’ of the galleries by an activist/art group called Platform. Their project C Words investigated the interconnections of carbon, climate, capital and culture, presenting installations, performances, actions, walks, courses, discussions and skills-sharing towards their transposition to the protests at COP 15. Events also included Hollington & Kyprianou’s auctions of late capitalist period artefacts with provenance and history provided by Spinwatch, the Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home’s activist cell during the half-term holiday (run by two adults and three children), and preparatory workshops of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’s Operation Bike Block to be later installed in the streets of Copenhagen.
Reactions from the Media were mostly predictable, questioning the use of public arts funding for political means: ‘Artists use public money to fund Copenhagen summit protest’ ran the headline in The Guardian newspaper (Oct 2009). But perhaps more significantly, Arnolfini used the opportunity to question its own motivations behind curating the project in the first place. Certainly at this time, ever more liberal cultural institutions seemed to be engaging with politics, and the politics of climate change in particular (for instance, FACT’s Climate for Change, Radical Nature at the Barbican, the Rethink shows in Copenhagen, to name only a few). So what was really going on in such initiatives? Evidently critique is an essential part of capitalist production so it should be no surprise that this is part of the culture industry too. Within the neo-liberal spaces of contemporary art, opinions not readily acceptable in other public places can be displayed but the politics can be easily contained and neutralised. Mindful of the various paradoxes in the promotion of critical art practices, Arnolfini posed a number of simple questions, beginning with ‘Who’s Recuperating Who? and then asking: What are the power relations between art, activism and cultural institutions? Who ultimately benefits from these relationships? What critical role can art and/or activism really have in a situation where any form of critique is automatically recuperated and neutralised by the mainstream? Under such conditions, what are effective strategies of opposition?
On the one hand, art appears to have lost its critical power as any form of critique is automatically recuperated; but on the other, the new situation opens up different strategies of opposition that respond to the ways in which power is organised. It is against this backdrop that a new online project by Les Liens Invisibles was commissioned to respond to the ways social media have changed the nature of the political process. In the wider culture, such claims are supported by the apparent success of various campaigns that hope to influence the outcomes of elections and in the rise of services that offer effective participation in the political process. For instance, Facebook applications such as Causes allow users to imagine the effectiveness of their political engagement by creating petitions in support of a particular cause. The ‘about’ statement expresses the ambition of no less than changing the world:
‘Facebook Platform presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, most of whom are on Facebook, in seizing the future and making a difference in the world around us. Our generation cares deeply, but the current system has alienated us. Causes provides the tools so that any Facebook user can leverage their network of real friends to effect positive change. The goal of all this is what we call “equal opportunity activism.” We’re trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.’
Les Liens Invisibles use the tactic of over-identification with such statements and a situation where activism itself appears to have been recuperated. In the age of over-mediated democracy, Repetitionr provides a platform for activism with minimal effort, an online petition service with a difference; offering advanced web 2.0 technologies to make participatory democracy a truly user-centered experience. The success of every campaign is guaranteed as just one click is all it takes to generate a whole campaign with up to a million automatic fake signatures. The project reflects the acknowledged need for new institutional forms that challenge existing systems of governance and participatory representational structures, and in addition, that challenge the discourse of neo-liberalism in general.
If this is an example of over-identification with real existing participatory democracy, then the provocation is that we need to rethink politics and develop far better strategies and techniques of organisation. To speculate further, what Repetitionr suggests is that new publics are required to engage with and to modify the infrastructures they inhabit as an extension of the concept of the public sphere. Evidently publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, arguing and protesting but also through modification of the domain or platform through which these practices are enacted. Thus the contradictions at the heart of action – between acting and being acted upon – are made more evident. According to Rancière, it is the very ‘axioms of democracy’ (of ruling and being ruled) that require rupture to open up discussion of the constitution of the subject and its relations.
Explore Re-Petitions.
Enjoy the experience of data hallucination.
http://www.repetitionr.com/