Massanari explores the ways that the far right uses memetic humor and geek masculinity as tools both to create a sense of community within these leaderless groups and to obfuscate their intentions
Category Archive: politics
The massive Venice Biennale talked about forced migrations, colonialism and its stubborn influence, climate (in)justice, exile, indigenous voices feeling like foreigners on their own land
In this episode, the conversation goes from “Wouldn’t it be fun to have extra sexual organs?” to “Why wouldn’t a loving and cute robot be better at ruling over the lives of citizens than human high-ranking officials?”
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Can everything – including vision, flexibility, imagination and other skills often associated with creative practices – be turned into data? Can you automate artistic processes and gestures? And how does socially applied AI enable a transition towards authoritarianism?
Can you make video games about environmental justice or labour? How about religion, the military, gun violence, mass incarceration, immigration or the Anthropocene?
During the conversation, we talked about her adventures with the Dutch secret service, with the New York City Police Department, CCTV operators in Liverpool and the art historian who hid Luis Barragán’s professional archives in a Swiss bunker. But we also discussed surveillance, censorship and the privatisation of culture
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The Net.art pioneers and media hackers talk about auctioning the votes of U.S. citizens, making DICK NFT and never suffering from nostalgia about the olden days of internet
How do you document, with honesty and integrity, a country where the wrong colour combination or the wrong friends can get you into trouble?
Jumana Manna’s film exposes how Israel is weaponising conservation laws to alienate Palestinians from their histories, land and traditions
An exhibition about contemporary art in Argentina presents different approaches to the representation of a culture often characterised by forms of violence
The parallel the artists make between Russian imperialism and demonology is that, in stories of possession, a demon takes control of the body from within. It acts as a parasite that enters a body and gradually consumes all its resources from within…
Artistic freedom is a core human right affected by rising political extremism, economic collapse, threats from digitisation, environmental catastrophes, a global pandemic and the return of war within Europe
Expanding upon early 20th-century techno-utopian visions, Heba Y. Amin’s project to sink the Mediterranean and relocate it within the African continent instigates a new vision for Africa and the Middle East by pinpointing what could be attained by and for those most affected by the wars waged for oil, resources and power
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s installation explores the concept of atmospheric violence, offering a historical and political reflection on the use of noise as a tool for oppression and control
An investigation into the colonial logic at work in contemporary Russian warfare through the largely unknown history of Soviet military cybernetic research
By using AI to anonymise the Russian soldiers, the artist points the finger at the Russian government’s failure to take responsibility for these deaths
How do we narrate extreme violence without succumbing to its necropolitical impact? How do we make the unheard audible?
How cold is weaponised to control, punish and persecute communities, individuals, in particular racialised people
It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources. CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked
From the politics of proxies to space extractivism and the commodification of the commons, including citizenship by investment and the art market, everything indicates that “offshore governance” has become the norm…
But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contents?
The ubiquity of access to information has lulled us into complacency with its flipside: ever more highly technologized forms of surveillance and the overexposure of our personal data
The digital revolution has given rise to new models of collaboration and knowledge production but also to new forms of exploitation, precariousness and dependency that have been likened to feudalism
An exhibition packed with artworks that are bold, socially-engaged and smart. This review focuses on the pieces that look at labour conditions, migration and the ghosts of past conflicts
A practical guide for working with data in more ethical, creative and responsible ways
Building on a long-shared history in the region, the projects covered in this volume use design and architecture to address social, political and ecological concerns along the shared border between Mexico and the USA
A rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. The author analyses its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organisation, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right
The book considers how artists have used cultural practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence
How hackers and hacking moved from being a target of the state to a key resource for the expression and deployment of state power
The artist’s critical approach to technology can be found in works such as an orchestra of musical instruments that mine for Bitcoins, a 3D printable kit to cut undersea internet cables, a Bitcoin mining machine that claims to be worst in the world, etc.
Artists, theorists, activists, and scholars propose concrete forms of non-fascist living as the rise of contemporary fascisms threatens the foundations of common life
Artist and researcher Paul O’Neill takes Dubliners and curious tourists on guided tours of the HQs, warehouses, data centers and other infrastructures the internet relies on
A participative installation that imitates the functioning of machines and embraces human imperfections and errors started quietly enough but ended up causing controversy and censorship in Hungary
Photographer Salvatore Vitale explores Switzerland’s security measures by focusing on “matter-of-fact” types of instructions, protocols, bureaucracies and clear-cut solutions which he visualizes in photographs, diagrams, and graphical illustrations
Artist Dani Ploeger has been looking at the new fences built to toughen “Fortress Europe.” In particular the ones that use heat sensors, sophisticated cameras and other so-called ‘smart’ technologies to shut off “illegal immigrants”
A VR-essay and performance reminds us that organising information is never innocent and that we shouldn’t trust a Silicon Valley giant with its archiving, exhibiting and mapping
DocLab Expo: Humanoid Cookbook offered the usual menu of interactive documentaries, VR cinema, performances and interactive experiments but with an extra edge of AI creativity and a bit of culinary action
The artists and designer is interested the often invisible political nature of spaces and technologies, and how the design of the ordinary is involved in shaping values, practices and ideologies
In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory?
These posters might be half a century old, but they have lost nothing of their strength, nor sadly of their relevance. Today we have hashtags and other social media tools but we’re still yearning for equality, freedom and justice