The Next Layer

In a two stop lecture tour I will be talking about New Tendencies in Zagreb on December 6th and in Ljubljana on December 7th. Here I share the abstract for the Ljubljana talk and links to the event websites.

Year by year Ars Electronica gets larger, greater and more successful. One visible sign of this success are the blinking lights of the ACE at night, like an upgraded spaceship out of 'Close Encounter of the Third Kind'.

In 2001, Shu Lea Cheang created Steam the green, Stream the field (Cheang, 2001-02), a work which anticipated a major shift in the discourse and practice of post-media art by 10 years. Shu Lea Cheang insists on calling herself a 'self-styled' artist, emphasising her autonomy to define her activities as art. Her projects highlight the potential of the coming together of social self-organisation with a social and trans-media art practice that combines landscapes and datascapes, the natural and the digital commons.

This text outlines a research strategy and context for the Fields exhibition to take place in Riga in 2014. While not directly about the exhibition, this text explores the notion of Fields as a broadening and deepening of an inquiry began with the exhibition Waves. The notion of the field and its various links into scientific disciplines purports a long term epistemic shift from fixed identities and dualisms to vectors and forces/lines of attraction and repulsion; from a world of fixed entities to one of energies and the exertion of force from a distance.

Dieser Artikel präsentiert in geraffter Form die sogenannte quantitative Revolution des Finanzwesens und dessen Crashs, aber auch dessen Widersprüche und Defizite als System. Anstatt Informationsgesellschaft sollten wir eigentlich Zeitalter des informationstechnisch gestützen Finanzkapitalismus sagen. Die paradigmatischen Leittechnologien - im technopolitischen Sinn - sind die Finanzmärkte und ihre Tools - Formeln, Bildschirme, Netzwerke, Computer. Diese "Revolution" ist begründet auf Finanzmathematik und die Computerisierung und Vernetzung der Börsen; ideologisch vollzog sie sich gleichzeitig mit dem Aufstieg des Neoliberalismus.

We humans are thinking, speaking creatures, with a theoretically limitless capacity to analyse the world around us, and, if we are lucky, to also make sense of our own internal worlds. Under informational capitalism an elite class of 'thought robbers' exploit our mental and affective capacities. We, and especially the untenured 'we', the indy intellectual 'we', or the cultural activist 'we', toil at our texts only to perhaps then witness them being padlocked inside hierarchies of knowledge which we cannot afford to access. The 'University Inc.' or 'edu-factory' and its co-dependent sibling, academic publishing, siphon the worst qualities of managerialism and profiteering to support systemised structures of knowledge enclosures. In response, the cognitariat have started to rebel. In 2012 a mathematician blogged the withdrawal of his labour from the Elsevier academic behemoth. His stance triggered worldwide solidarity. While the unfolding narrative of grassroots mobilisation resonates with the official, overly earnest Open Access movement, it seems to hold more anarchic possibilities for the cooperative creation of unfettered systems of production and exchange of knowledge.

No one who suggests to do work under the title Fields should be surprised if it turns out to be fertile. Or maybe even too fertile, where the naming of the one concept, field, generates a multiplicity of connections with other things nearby, fields, whose interconnections can be thought of as pathways, channels, tracks, boundaries, trees-structures, rhizomes, lines of flight, trajectories, networks ...