Technopolitics

The most influential discourse on media art up to and around 1995 uncritically based itself on techno-science and the techno-imaginary which it creates. It offers a technologically deterministic interpretation of the relationship between societies and social change. This discourse was successful in institution building and is still very influential today, even though its foundations can shown to be problematic. This is the essence of my 2005 MA thesis on "Technological Determinism in Media Art" which I republish here due to difficulties with my old site.

The researcher and euromayday activist Alex Foti has created a diagram based on a framework of techno-economic paradigm change similar to ours - I must admit debt to Brian who first has made me aware of it. The Grid & the Fork: Critical Dynamics of Advanced Capitalism from the Second to the Third Industrial Revolution (2006) offers itself as a very good starting place for the discussion of different models of technopolitical change and for the creation of own diagram. Both the original and a first attempt at modification are included below.

We propose to develop a cooperative, open-content research format that will facilitate a detailed theoretical debate on the historical relations between technological and political transformations, culminating in studies of the present crisis of "informationalism" or the "network society." Building on existing concepts of the technological paradigm, we seek to enlarge the current horizons of research by establishing a chronological framework to track developments in the arts and the communications media as well as changing patterns of consumption, circulation, self-organization and political mobilization. The resulting more broadly integrated model of technopolitics will allow individual researchers to develop their own applications of shared concepts and resources, thus contributing to an informational commons and an enriched public sphere.