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Federico: CRITICALITY

CRITICALITY (>>> MAIN QUESTION: Thanks for the insightful and richly hyperlinked presentation, and for outlining the different threads and vectors that populated your vision and the work that is archived at Impakt’s website. Thanks for the amount of labour you have put throughput the years trying to maintain a critical discourse on media art and media discourse. 

There are terms present in your presentation and in your website such as:

Modern love
Reclaiming agency
Soft Machine
Weird gnosis 
We are data
Open source intelligence
Turning tables 
Digital Agency

All these are calls for liberating alternative critical views, they raise awareness on how technology performs. Any of your slides could be taken as a departure point for further critical reflection. Let me try to formulate my question and the concerns we have at HH. Of course, I believe, we are all aligned with the mission of “turning tables”… the agency of disrupting current power structures… however there is a torsion that makes the act of “turning the tables” a complicated one. There’s a bi-polarity we need to reflect upon, a polarity present in your presentation, a polarity to grasp for us to be able to change existing media power-structures. It is perhaps a polarity I find when I look at the events organised at Impakt: a libidinal escape and an attempt to analyse (comprehend, rationalise…control).

Where do you position yourself and Impakt in such axis, where are you heading towards? Do you align more with the libidinal materialism of escape, a digital materials of the cypher and the glitch… or with the neo-rationalism crafting of planetary modes of sustenance and connection? This is a complicated question as it could lead in heated philosophical battles…In other words, do we escape platforms (blackholes) by rejecting technology or by transforming it, by augmenting ourselves through it? Shall we work on the subject’s liberation through refusal first or constructing collective structures where new subjects could be formed? Disruption or construction, subjective Escape or Collective consolidation? 

Of course one could say both… but if you are to choose where would you put your labour in, at first: subjectivity (unconditional freedom of the subject) or collectivity (the necessity of taming one’s freedom for allowing that of others)? It seems that you are moving in the direction of promoting  collective consolidation with your most recent work… could you expand a little on such question and where do you locate the agency for us to move forward given contemporary power-structures?

>>>SUB-QUESTION
And in relation to this, I would like you to expand on Dao: which in my view is a technology that is both, disrupting and constructive. How do you see the future in relation to blockchain?

Art the the agency of connecting, moving between fields, the power of inventing a language. Or the possibility of escaping given terms, frameworks and forced nominations.

From Stiegler, we remember this: “be[ing] entirely calculable by algorithms we reduced to nothing.”. (Bernard Stiegler, “Être entièrement calculable par des algorithmes nous réduit à rien” (14-06-2016)). In sum, given the conditions of the present “that’s what we’re interested in: revolutionary schisis as opposed to the despotic signifier.” (Gilles Deleuze, “Negotiations” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.24.), where (for E.Laclau) “an empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified. This definition is also, however, the enunciation of a problem. For how would it be possible that a signifier is not attached to any signified and remains, nevertheless, an integral part of a system of signification? ... The only possibility for a stream of sounds being detached from any particular signified while still remaining a signifier is if, through the subversion of the sign which the possibility of an empty signifier involves, something is achieved which is internal to signification as such. What is this possibility?” (Ernesto Laclau, “Emancipation(s)” (London: Verso, 1996), p.36). In search for the non-signified in-betweenness…The slippery sign, the sign that does not belong, embracing the agency of “parasitical" practices (the “parasite” from Michel Serres, later on taken up by Matteo Pasquinelli).

AMBIGUITY: The ability to find allies in the most understated grounds. The necessity of moving between orders of discourse to break away from pre-constituted identities, hegemonic-dogmatic frameworks-narratives. The desire to promote minoritarian practices (as per how Deleuze intended it) and alternative world-views (see the work of Shannen Mattern, who talks about the importance of indigenous cartographies…and that line of thought, herewith Tiqqun’s famous statement: “Rather than new critiques, new cartographies are what we need. Cartographies not for Empire, but for lines of flight out of it.”

A speculative attitude based on EXCESS - REDUNDANCY - INEFFICIENCY is to be considered, by default, a DISRUPTIVE one. Speculating is executed order to exit, in order to resist, to allow interstices for new modes of living and making. This mode has particular association to critical disruptive practices that started in the ’60 and that fuelled liberation through a post-structural discourse. However there are issues with proceeding in that direction… which is a direction that seems to celebrate solipsistic withdrawal and that is not able to articulate collective construction. Hence, the disrupting act must be followed up by a constructing attitude. Irrational drives and rational scaffolding thereafter…

Constructing alternative modes breaking the habit, the default, the “given”, the stuff that generates a framework and through which existence gets played out passively, the stuff that is taken for granted.

Speculation is always accompanied to criticality. Critical “fictioning” - critical, a term which connects to one of your later points. With fictioning I have in mind the work of Laruelle and Deleuze. Or a more recent collection by  David Burrows, Simon O'Sullivan, “Fictioning - The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy”, where they state:

“Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence.”

Fictioning and speculation, how to reply them which the risk of unfolding into dadaist absurdity. Critical-fiction as in science fiction, to be constructed collectively (side note, see Haraway - “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far”