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Conformity, Process and Deviation: Digital Arts as 'Outsider' |
Jessie Robertson (Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK)
Re-claiming Anonymity: Surveillance and Aesthetic Resistance in the Post-Snowden Age
The Internet has been a space for aesthetic subversion and Intervention since its inception, with Tactical media groups like eToy and RTMark engaging in virtual sit-ins and carefully orchestrated hacks which re-defined the parameters of art and activism. Whilst these actions of early net-art widely went under the art world radar, in the past year or so, Internet art has gained considerable attention, rebranded as the cool, marketable “post-Internet”, which the mainstream art world has rushed to embrace, label and canonise. Despite the sudden popularity of object-based, almost anti-political “post-Internet” art in museums, galleries and the market, there are a number of artists who continue to use the Internet as a space for subversive action, testing and challenging the highly politicised contemporary climate of Internet surveillance, corporate and state power and social media.
Taking Jacques Rancière’s discussion of ‘Politicised Art’ as that which ensures ‘the readability of a political signification’ whilst simultaneously causing a ‘sensible or perceptual shock which resists signification’ as a theoretical frame, this paper will address the potential of Internet-based socially and politically engaged art to intervene in and subvert the state and corporate power structures which dominate digital life. Focusing on recent tactical media style performative hacks such as Face to Facebook (2011) by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico as well as works dealing with issues of surveillance such as Wafaa Bilal’s 3rdi (2010-11) and James Bridle’s Dronestagram (2012), I will Investigate the power of social media as both a tool and a platform for subversive aesthetic action. Arguing that suitable political art is not that which attempts to build new legitimacies, but rather that which acts as a disruption or negation of existing power structures, this paper will propose a renewed conception of socially and politically engaged art in the contemporary ‘all out’ Internet age.
Biography:
Jessie Robertson is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her PhD project aims to re-frame and re-consider socially and politically engaged aesthetic practice in the 'all out' Internet age. She received her MA in Art History with distinction from the Courtauld in 2013. Alongside her PhD she works as a freelance researcher and volunteers on the participation programme at the Gasworks.