The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Bill Roberts
Organised Networks as Institutional Critique
Over the past decade, organised networks have become a key feature in the alternative and activist media landscape. Ranging from mailing lists to collective blogs and para-institutions, these networks have been conceived and initiated as responses to the perceived limitations of ‘tactical media’ (TM) of the 1990s. For Geert Lovink and others, the ‘hit-and-run’ ethos of TM increasingly began to show itself, in its ‘short-termism’ and relatively narrow political horizons, as the mirror image of official neoliberal culture.
Organised networks are intended instead, then, as accountable, sustainable and (crucially) scalable architectures of ‘immanent critique’ – of the ubiquity of techno-capitalist culture as a whole, including the Net itself – whose ‘institutional logic is internal to the socio-technical dimensions of the media of communication’ (Lovink).
Just as figures like Lovink and artist Gregory Sholette have begun to provide sober reassessments of the heyday of TM in the 1990s, TM itself has begun to be embraced by the art world as the ‘latest stage’ in the practice of ‘institutional critique’ – art’s critique of its social and economic constitution. TM’s great attraction here has been its own hybrid institutional status, within and between the fields of art and media activism. Meanwhile, organised networks have themselves so far been discussed mostly in the spheres of media studies and net criticism, as a challenge to the mainstream mass media and as potential pathways for new forms of direct democracy.
This paper will ask if and how the shift among net critics and media theorists from TM to organised networks could also become part of an art-world narrative of institutional critique. What problems are posed for the art world’s framing and absorption of activist media practice when that practice itself moves from the production of identifiable works and events – amenable to discussion in aesthetic terms – to the production of continuously evolving network architectures of discussion and critique on the model of the academy? Do organised networks jettison the ‘aesthetic dimension’ entirely, or do they demand the theorisation of an art beyond the production of discrete works by discrete artists? In posing these questions, the paper will consider some of the attempts so far to do just this, that is, to theorise organised networks as a practice of ‘distributed aesthetics’ (Lovink and Anna Munster), of the ‘artwork-as-network-in-process’ (John Roberts), as ‘processual aesthetics’ (Ned Rossiter) or ‘info-aesthetics’ (Lev Manovich).