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Thinking about Konrad Becker on Critical Intelligence:

  • “At the heart of the new communications landscape are the machine classification and analysis of data. These cognitive tools and analytical data are no longer accessible to a critical civil society or non‐governmental organizations, let alone artists or cultural producers.” (Paul, p. 387)
  • “Everyone is now supposed to be a creative entrepreneur.” (Paul, p. 388)
  • “Creativity, the new oil for the machines of social organization and the construction of a self, is harnessed into the pragmatism of economic rationality and wage labor.” (Paul, p. 388)
  • “Dissent is easily appropriated in the new spirit of capitalism and today’s critique is tomorrow’s business idea. Creative industry embraces aestheticized boutique activism that offers affective relief with a maximum of inconsequentiality.” (Paul, p. 390)
  • “Effective strategies of resistance and critical interventions need to build on under-standing the past; however, a change from disciplinarian institutions to a society of control has transformed the playing field.” (Paul, p. 390)
  • “In societies of control embedded in ambient intelligence, electronic devices are orchestrated to exploit individuals.” (Paul, p. 394)
  • “Increasingly now, works are regarded as “under construction” and changing in versions; considered only temporarily fixed and adaptable to contexts and usages. However, cultural practice is moving on to a process‐based understanding of interventions that deals with flows and fields. It confronts a playing field of tactical and strategic moves where artistic operations intervene in the invisible dynamic interactions of material and immaterial.” (Paul, p. 395)
  • “critical art gives primacy to agency and intervening in a post‐aesthetic strategy.” (Paul, p. 396)
  • “Through an understanding of past practices, the future requires new forms of critical interventions beyond artistic gimmicks.” (Paul, p. 396)
  • “Art practices, as autonomous examinations of processes, investigate spheres of influence, as well as systemic reality.” (Paul, p. 396)
  • “New forms of collective practices that intervene in processes are more relevant than past models of a dubious individual genius.” (Paul, p. 396)
  • “cultural intelligence is concerned with the dynamics of the virtual and symbolic in materially tangible places” (Paul, p. 397)
  • “Digital art practice can do more than propagate technical progress and provide affect stimulus in aestheticized production cycles.” (Paul, p. 398)
  • “Cultural intelligence works to provide an informational context for others and applies technologies of the imagination to tell another story.” (Paul, p. 398)

Becker is critical of the way in which creativity and art is co-opted by systems of economy and power, and advocates for works to adopt critical intelligence (a military term) strategy to investigate power. Basically: know your enemy so you can fight them.

https://benefits.com/glossary/critical-intelligence/

Thinking about Radicant Art:

  • “Contemporary artists are already laying the foundations of an art that is not radical, but radicant. The word “radicant” describes organisms that create their roots gradually as they advance. Being radicant is about acting out ones roots in heterogeneous contexts and formats, that is, to deny them any initial value; translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than subtracting.” (Bourriaud, 2017)
  • “Radicant plants grow in a way that is not determined by the ground they seeded in. In the same way, a radicant artist would trace journeys in both history and geography.” (Bourriaud, 2017)
  • “We carry our culture with us—fragments of identity, nostalgic debris or self-assertions—, or connect to our place of origin through the Internet or parables. Artists do the same. As they take responsibility for the cultural elements that they select, they reconnect them to the territories they roam in their practice: the aim is to operate the proper connections, to manufacture circuits and circulations, rather than to defend a formal territory. This makes artists semionauts, the inventors of trajectories among signs.” (Bourriaud, 2017)

Not totally sure what to make of this just yet.

Thinking about HOW NOT TO BE SEEN:

  • “Steyerl hyperlinks disparate environments, historical events, and spheres of meaning by way of puns and coincidences.” (Sparks, 2015, p. 2)
  • “In Steyerl’s work, these lexical chance encounters constitute a modus operandi of political revelation, mapping unlikely connections between the realms of art, economy, ecology, and global power regimes in a way that seems to augur their ultimate structural collusion.” (Sparks, 2015, p. 2)
  • “Today exposure has become more of a threat than a privilege. Steyerl posits the passive move to avoid being monitored, or the active one to destroy cameras and surveillance equipment, as breaching a social contract, a deliberate denial of the privileged visual circuits of surveillance between governments, corporations, and the public.” (Sparks, 2015, p. 9)
  • “Steyerl has advocated for the counterintuitive move to embrace objectification, urging people to identify with images, and to identify images as things :(Sparks, 2015, p. 9)
  • “With some irony, Steyerl’s video offers two possible alternatives: escape or havoc. Withdrawal has often been suggested as the only means of refusing a contemporary working regime that utterly depends on workers’ identification with and commitment to their subjugated roles.” (Sparks, 2015, p. 14)
  • “The ultimate gesture of HOWNOTTOBESEEN, figures pummeling a resolution target with their fists, is in fact an act of sabotage – the industrial era’s radical counterpart to contemporary calls for withdrawal. In a powerful application of her signature wordplay, Steyerl’s last protocol – the strike– encapsulates both the refusal of work and physical retaliation, the evacuating cut, and the defiant swipe.” (Sparks, 2015, p. 14)

One: as Sparks highlights off the top, I really like the way Steyerl “hyperlinks disparate environments” and ideas in her writing and work.

Two: HOW NOT TO BE SEEN really got me thinking about surveillance and my digitally projected representation within the context of capitalism, which I am grappling with as I work on my new website and the idea of removing myself from mainstream social media.

Thinking about the Aesthetics of Resistance:

  • “But if we look at artistic research from the perspective of conflict or more precisely of social struggles, a map of practices emerges that spans most of the 20th century and also most of the globe. It becomes obvious that the current debates do not fully acknowledge the legacy of the long, varied and truly international history of artistic research which has been understood in terms of an aesthetics of resistance.” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 2)
  • Especially strongly dematerialized practices with pronounced modernist features are quickly absorbed into information capitalism because they are compressed, quick to absorb and easily transmitted.” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 3)
  • “many of the historical methods of artistic research are tied to social or revolutionary movements, or to moments of crisis and reform” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 3)
  • “On the other hand, artistic research projects in many cases also lay claim to singularity. They create a certain artistic set up, which claims to be relatively unique and produces its own field of reference and logic. This provides it with a certain autonomy, in some cases an edge of resistance against dominant modes of knowledge production.” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 4)
  • “While specific methods generate a shared terrain of knowledge – which is consequently pervaded by power structures – singular methods follow their own logic. While this may avoid the replication of existing structures of power/knowledge, it also creates the problem of the proliferation of parallel universes, which each speak their own, untranslatable language.” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 4)
  • “pull towards the production of applied or applicable knowledge/art, which can be used for entrepreneurial innovation, social cohesion, city marketing, and thousands of other aspects of cultural capitalism.” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 5)
  • “what do we do with an ambivalent discipline, which is institutionalized and disciplined under this type of conditions? How can we emphasize the historical and global dimension of artistic research and underline the perspective of conflict?” (Steyerl, 2010, p. 5)

A call for critical theory within artistic research, similar to Natalie Loveless and others.

Thinking about my program (MDM):

Over the winter holidays, I thought long and hard about whether this program was right for me. Should I drop out and maybe pursue an MFA? Am I just sticking with it due to sunk cost fallacy?

I think a big part of my feeling like the program isn’t a good fit is the lack of critical theory being employed throughout the curriculum, which was something heavily embedded in my undergrad, and that I consider a crucial component of higher education.

As Becker and Steyerl (and likely many others) both highlight, the co-opting of creativity and art into capitalist structures is pervasive. Reading this, I realize that the MDM program seems to be all about that.

So I went back and re-read the material on the program website which lured me to it in the first place. Yes, it clearly highlights business and “creative entrepreneurship” as goals of the program. But it also leans on terms like innovation, disruption and sustainability, which to me entails a need for critical theory.

My goal in leaving Dawson to study in this program was to open doors to a life and career more entwined with the digital world that I’m interested in. I’ll admit I was drawn to the idea of success in business or entrepreneurship as a result of this masters, and in some way that is still a goal. But now what I have to keep in mind and reconcile, is that anything I do, whether it’s business or art or just being human, should be informed by critical theory.

And so maybe this program is a perfect spot to be. I can be the one to remind others to actually be innovative, disruptive and sustainable.