Resistance Screengrab 7
RESISTANCE
Screengrab 7
Curatorial Essay | Resistance: Screengrab 7 | James Cook University | Townsville City Council, Gallery Services
Image credit: Mitch Goodwin (2015) Screengrab 7 installation, Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville, Australia
Essay Introduction
(Read the full curatorial essay: PDF)
We live in contradictory times. Irrespective of our geography we are wedged between the hegemony of entrenched oppositional forces. In a sense, we are the collateral damage of their friction. Of the old rallying against the new, of bold invention and nostalgic yearning, of extreme science and conservative politics, of playful language and language that plays with us, of terror and anti-terror, of social inclusion and those who seek to divide and to conquer.
This malaise of disruption, within the politics of identity and the parameters of personal space, is also rapidly seeping into our networks. In a Post-Snowden world brimming with silent imperturbable devices we are experiencing a growing sense of uncertainty around notions of security, privacy and identity. What now constitutes a private act? And what of space, our personal geography? Once a site of freedom and spontaneity of movement it now constitutes a data asset to be sold on the open market.
A collective anxiety about mass electronic surveillance by servers in the tundra, by drones in the skies and black domes in shopping malls present a new kind of permanent virtuality, or as Tudor Sala has observed, a “surveillance apocalypse” [1]. So to the miniaturisation of devices for listening and for watching – brain scanners at airports, cube satellites in orbit and swarms of RFID tags in our clothes and under our skin bring with them an uncanny likeness to tales we only ever used to watch in the dark. Coupled with the 24/7 mapping of the planet – the Earth as an algorithm rather than an ecosystem – we are experiencing a new type of absolute power.
Image credit: Mitch Goodwin (2015) Installation view of Heidi Kumao’s “Egress” (USA, 2014), Pinnacles Gallery, Townsville, Australia
As we struggle to frame a substantive view of the meta-narratives that constitute our contemporary moment – religious terror, climate change, global trade pacts and big data – we are also conscious of the omnipresence of the machine gaze. What we are experiencing is at once global and local; a devolution of both history and politics at the whim of a new type of panopticon. In this place “the distinction between left and right is by now less important than the distinction between truth politics and power politics”. These of course are age-old forces, multiplexing along familiar fault lines. As Sala observes, “total surveillance—whether as ideal or nightmare, whether as theory or practice, whether as tradition or innovation—is by no means a contrivance of the present or the near future, but rather a construction of the distant past.” The difference being however, that now these forces operate within much closer proximity, in ever diminishing circles in a variety of ambiguous cloaks and guises.
The cultural temperature of the times is very different now, but the vision machine has also become a democratised technology with many components. With the aid of the lens, the wireless spectrum, the radar, GPS coordinates, open software and databases we can also hack back. Artists such as Trevor Paglen, Jacob Appelbaum and David Bridle have set the aesthetic tone for this resistance. [2] Events such as SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for Resistance [3] hosted by the Disruption Network Lab and Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies: Exercising and Resisting Surveillance Then and Now both in Berlin in the autumn of 2015 point to an emergent critical debate surrounding not only surveillance technology but the tactics for pushing back in a Post-Snowden dome.
Image credit: Morehshin Allahyari (2015) Additivist, USA
It is from here through the reach of the network that we can trace the emergence of a mediated resistance: from the geo-political campaigns of the Adbusters Foundation in the mid-90s culminating in the Battle for Seattle in 1999, to the Arab Spring and Occupy movements of the 2010s to the anti-austerity politics of Syriza and Podemos and the mass migration of refugees in present day Europe. Each period is representative of a heavily mediated and multi-layered reaction to dramatic shifts in both absolute power and notions of truth. They also represent a shift in our experience and articulation of notions of resistance:
“Today the increasing importance of digitally mediated action is putting into question the previous centrality accorded to ‘ collective identity’.” Since the emergence of global social justice movements of the late 1990s “older forms of solidarity (where organizations act through their members, via structures of delegation and representation) are giving way to new forms of fluidarity where personal experience was becoming so central to collective action that previous forms of ‘social movement’ were giving way to new forms of ‘ experience movement’”. (MacDonald, 2015) [4]
Image credit: Video still from Sirin Bahar Damirel’s “Living With Leviathan” (Turkey, 2013)
For Screenrab7, all forms of resistance were considered, by an international community of over 400 media arts practitioners from some 54 countries: the politics of resistance, the physics of resistance, the messiness of resistance, and the urgency of resistance. In this age of contradiction – and as Bruce Sterling has observed, of “favela chic and gothic high-tech” – it is the duality of our relationship to the forces of order and control that is central to the examination being conducted here.
We resist, not as some might have it – to impede or to destroy the status quo – indeed, that would be too obvious, too easy, and too predictable. Resistance through art making, through creative expression, is subtler and more nuanced than that. The act of resistance in art, as in life, is to demand a more complex, empathetic and interconnected human experience.
Read the full curatorial essay: PDF
View the Screengrab7 catalogue: ISSUU
Download the Screngrab7 catalogue: PDF
References
[1] Sala, T (2015) Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies: Exercising and Resisting Surveillance Then and Now, Topoi Building Dahlem, Berlin (see: https://community.topoi.org/web/b-5-cofund-surveillance-workshop)
[2] For examples see Paglen’s The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) (2013) and his Untitled Drone series (2010) (http://www.paglen.com). Also see Bridle’s Dronestagram series (2012-2015) (https://instagram.com/dronestagram/) and especially the text that accompanies his image construction Light of God (2012) (https://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/8122855101/).
[3] SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for Resistance by the Disruption Network Lab in conjunction with SAMISDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy by Jacob Appelbaum at NOME Gallery, Berlin curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli (see: http://www.disruptionlab.org/samizdata/)
[4] McDonald, K (2015) From Indymedia to Anonymous: rethinking action and identity in digital cultures in Information, Communication & Society, 18:8, Routledge, London
