The Artists Network, the Data-Body, and the Social-Body

The Artists Network, the Data-Body, and the Social-Body (1 hour talk + possible collective brainstorming workshop session) with Jennifer Seaman Cook

Description

“Electronic art is electronic education is inter net and television for and about people. My television video electronic educational inter net art is for people, minds and bodies. Electronic art educational inter net television. Not so hard to imagine.” -Peer Bode (Experimental Television Center)

This talk begins from a seemingly simple cultural historical premise: that the Net Art/ Anti-Globalism movement theories of data-bodies, new forms of civil disobedience, and the performative matrix of artist networks between virtual and real spaces were formed under pre-digital conditions and artistic practices based in the intermedia movement. More importantly, I argue that pre-digital practices of the artist communications infrastructure as both network and counterinstitution-- derived from media revolutions of the underground press, conceptual and process art practices of social sculpture, and working class progressivist artist workers movements of the 20th century-- allowed for counterhegemonic deterritorializations and reterritorializations of emergent media networks and resources. These intermedia cultural movements prioritized hybrid ontologies and adapted tactically from the pre-digital to digital cusp through media ecologies of electronic globalization characterizing neoliberal mobility and modularity. I recommend revisiting these early data-body organizational structures to combat the de-and-reterritorializing threats of multinational, corporate modularity to the 21st century city as data-body, doing so through rapid, targeted changes to that civic data-body via tactical media interventions in the social body. As opposed to particular conceptions of tactical media as performance art based media activism, I look to tether the mediated discursivity of its social practice art to actions that are both cultural and micropolitical: locational and geared towards alternative economies and broader social movements.

A possible workshop based on this talk will use key concepts to engage teams in collective, qualitative brainstorming on platform affordances for change.

Type: [talk] + [workshop] Length: [1 hour] + [30 min] Additional considerations: "Artist Network Happening" 30 people

Session Objective

An understanding of structures of cooperative artist funding, public funding, class intersectional pockets of support across cultural institutions of the late 20th century (70s-90s).
Lessons for how we might cultivate the same horizontalist goals for emergent media access, education and resources within the under-resourced data-body challenges of 21st century, virtual capitalisms.
Historical guidance in brainstorming the creation of alternative economies to support necessary relocations/reterritorializations of the cultural political artist network within the material needs and resiliencies of the social body.

Material and Technical Requirements

Macbook pro dongle, internet connection, projection equipment, backup mac laptop

Presenter(s)

Name: Jennifer Seaman Cook Email: jseamcook@gmail.com Url(s): NOPE Twitter: @Histouroborus
GitHub: NOPE

Interested in attending the sprint July 16-18: [N] Interested in a community billet: EXPLAIN PLEASE

Presenter Bio

Jennifer Seaman Cook (@Histouroborus) is an American Studies scholar across the arts, media, technology, public culture, and transnational cultural and social movements. She specializes in emergent media history, mediations of cultural and social theory, and counterinstitutional networks. In addition to her academic scholarship, her essays have been published by 3:am Magazine, Furtherfield, PopMatters, Salon, and Verso (forthcoming). Her poetry and hybrid political writing has been published with Berfrois, Cedilla Literary Journal (archived at University of Montana), Lunch Ticket, New Binary Press, Queen Mob’s Tea House and more. Jennifer has also consulted for documentaries produced for PBS, The Science Museum of London, and The Royal Academy of Arts, and has created public culture mobile app documentaries for the Montreal Infringement Festival/ World Infringement Congress and Burchfield Penney Art Center Archives. Jennifer teaches at the State University of New York's University at Buffalo.

ournetworks / 2018-submissions