Panelists:
Marco Deseriis (Doctoral candidate, New York University)
Leonidas Martin Saura (Artist and professor, Yo Mango!)
Janez Janša (Artist, Janez Janša Janez Janša Janez Janša)

This panel of the Upgrade! series explores the aesthetic and political conditions of possibility for the emergence of the “multiple singularity,” an apparently contradictory term that describes the making of (collective) subjectivities as a process characterized by multiplicity and instability.

By tracing a genealogy of collective pseudonyms and “multiple-use names” such as Ned Ludd, Alan Smithee, Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot and Luther Blissett, and connecting it to contemporary experiments such as Yo Mango! and Janez Janša, the panel will present and discuss radical strategies of subjectivation in times in which subjectivity is presented as an open, shared process by the very architecture of social media.

*Watch the live stream on May 10 at eyebeam.org/live

***

About the Panelists

Marco Deseriis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and a free-lance journalist. In 2003, along with co-author Giuseppe Marano, he wrote Net.Art: L’arte della Connessione (Milan: Shake), a book which explores net.art both as an internet-based art and an art of networking. Deseriis has also been involved with the organization of the net culture festival Digital-Is-Not-Analog (d-i-n-a.net) and of the culture jamming festival The Influencers (theinfluencers.org), which is currently hosted and funded by the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB). In 2007-2009 he received three grants from the NYU Council for Media & Culture to program the conference Radars & Fences at New York University. His dissertation, currently titled On Distributed Subjectivity: Collective Pseudonyms as Social Media, traces a genealogy of collective and distributed naming strategies by bridging gaps between the history of the labor movement and the twentieth-century avant-gardes.

Leónidas Martín Saura is Professor of video and political art at the School of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona. He also lectures and holds seminars as a visiting professor at other universities in various countries. As a co-founder of three art and activist collectives Las Agencias (2001-2003), YoMango! (2002-2007) and Enmedio (2007-current), he has designed and co-produced a number of guerrilla-communication projects including New Kids on The Black Block, Pret-a-Revolter, O la Bolsa o la Vida, Dinero Gratis, Yo Mango Tango, You Will Not Have a Home in Your Fucking Life, La Bola and Fiesta en el Inem among others. Leonidas is also a scriptwriter, filmmaker, and graphic designer.

Janez Janša is a conceptual artist, performer, and producer who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Milan, Italy. His work has strong social connotations and is characterized by an intermedia approach. He is co-founder and director of Aksioma, Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. His first public artistic project was the urban installation I Need Money to Be an Artist, which was presented first in Ljubljana, Slovenia (1996) and then in Venice, Italy (1997). In 2001, he established (with I. Štromajer) Problemarket.com – the Problem Stock Exchange, a virtual platform on troubled public companies. The following year, Janša produced machinaZOIS, an electro-mechanical patron that financially supports contemporary artists and artistic productions. He then started development of DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora, a virtual parliament that provides voters with the opportunity to decide on a series of life-related issues. In 2005, Janša established the platform RE:akt!, which examines the media’s role in manipulating perceptions and creating (post)modern historical myths and contemporary mythology. A part of this platform is the project Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav by Janez Janša, Janez Janša, and Janez Janša.

***

Upgrade! is an international network of autonomous nodes located throughout the world that are united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Upgrade! NY is a monthly programming series co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. The 2010 curatorial theme explores open source activist and creative practices. http://upgradeny.net

Brief introductory remarks by Steve Kurtz (Critical Art Ensemble) Marco Deseriis, (New York University), Beka Economopulous (Not An Alternative), McKenzie Wark (New School), Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men), Gabriella Coleman (New York University), Konrad Becker (World-Information Institute).

Moderators: Ted Byfield (New School University) and Jim Fleming (Autonomedia Verlag)

For centuries, art has been put on pedestals and in pillories, literally and figuratively, over its supposed capacity to carry a critical, political charge. Yet the trends of the last few decades – the birth pangs of hypercapital and environmental catastrophe – have hardly brought about any form of art potent enough to meet challenges on that scale.

In September 2009, the World-Information Institute convened a group of digital theorists and practitioners to debate whether art has a future beyond a “creative industry” bent on decorating disaster – or, if not, what new kinds of approaches might be called for. This book (Autonomedia 2010) distills that debate.

Contributions by: Konrad Becker (World-Information Institute), Ted Byfield (Nettime), Amanda McDonald Crowley (Eyebeam) Steve Kurtz (Critical Art Ensemble), Jim Fleming (Autonomedia), Claire Pentecost (Continental Drift), Peter Lamborn Wilson (Temporary Autonomous Zone). Interventions by Bifo, Marco Deseriis, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, McKenzie Wark, and Felix Stalder.

Location
Institute for Public Knowledge
20, Cooper Square – 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003

RSVP at http://www.nyu.edu/media.culture/events/event.html?e_id=2324
Web site: http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/

Description
A symposium with Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Carroll, Teddy Cruz, Helga Tawil Souri, Laila el Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv.

Radars and Fences 2010 explores the production of the Israel/Palestine and Mexico/US borders, examining how they engage affects, bodies, and spatial scales.
Despite their seemingly confounding specificities, Radars & Fences wishes to open up a dialogue between these disciplinary boundaries and across cultural and national borders in order to enable new terms of practical and political engagement. By bringing together researchers and practitioners from a plurality of backgrounds, Radars and Fences provides a cross-disciplinary and experimental platform whereby researchers, artists, journalists, and activists can negotiate new and critical
positions.

SCHEDULE

10:00 – 10:15 am Welcome and Opening Remarks

Marita Sturken, Chair, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU

10:15 – 10:30 am Conference Overview

Scott Selberg, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU

10:30 – 12:00 pm Presentations

Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Sara Carroll Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g lab. (Visual Arts, UCSD/CALIT2/University of Michigan).
“Transborder Immigrant Tool or Aesthetic Sustenance?: Off the Radar, On
the Fence.”

Laila El Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv, Palestinian journalist and Israeli designer.
“You are not Here: A Tour of Gaza through the Streets of Tel Aviv.”

12:00 – 1:15 pm Lunch Break

1:15 – 2:45 pm Presentations

Teddy Cruz, Department of Visual Arts, UCSD.

Helga Tawil Souri, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. “Israeli Air Power.”

2:45 – 4:30 pm Long Table Discussion

***

Radars & Fences III is organized by Scott Selberg, Marco Deseriis, and Hatim El-Hibri, doctoral students in Media, Culture, and Communication.

Co-sponsorship by: the NYU Council for Media & Culture, the Hemispheric Institute, the Taub Center for Israel Studies, the Humanities Initiative
Grant-In-Aid, and the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.

By collecting the contributions of thousands of MTurk’s providers Koblin realized a version of Daisy Bell sung by two thousand voices, a $100 bill drawn by 10,000 contributors (paid 1 cent each), and a very large flock of sheep all facing left.

In this video interview Koblin explains what inspired him to ask 10,000+ MTurkers to draw a sheep for 2 cents a piece:

After watching the video I emailed him a couple of questions. In particular I asked him whether aside from assigning the Mturks an unusual and aesthetic task such as drawing a sheep he had tried to involve them on a different level, for instance whether he tried to involve them in a discussion on possible future developments of the project. His first answer was:

[The Sheep Market] was a commentary on the alienation of the workers and they were not involved in any context or concepting.

I then clarified my question arguing that if the artist elaborates a concept and other people realize it on his/her behalf, the division of labor between conceptualization and execution (as well as the hierarchical structure which is embedded in the very notion of crowdsourcing)
remain untouched. His answer was:

This is exactly the point. There was no attempt to balance this
imbalance because the narrative and context of the project is to raise
questions about this relationship.

The workers have no idea what they’re doing. They simple instruments
in a larger process. I wrote a bit about this context here.

After all… does the shepherd ask his sheep where they would like to go?

Although I understand this answer in that it highlights the formal coherence of the project, I find it also symptomatic of some of the issues we run into every time we try to concatenate art and politics. As a matter of fact, conceptual artists generally place little value on the possible material effects of their projects. As Sol LeWitt famously wrote on Artforum in 1967:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.

From this angle, crowdsourcing art can only be a form of commentary uponremote workers’ condition but not something that tries to affect this condition by for instance engendering a non-exploitative model for producing and redistributing revenues. Since the concept is king, the concept cannot be contradictory and “disturbed” by a material practice that points somewhere else.

Conversely, activists generally value the material consequences of their actions (such as the organization of a successful campaign and the pursuit of concrete objectives) but do not focus on the larger implications that their interventions may have. To stick to The Sheep Market example, an activist would say that as long as the project does not affect the material conditions of the MTurks, its political value is close to nil.

The problem can be recast, however, when we provide an unconventional definition of aesthetics such as that provided by Jacques Ranciere for instance. As Ranciere writes in this text on “The Poitics of Aesthetics”

[Art] is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a “sense of the common” embodied in a common sensorium…

The artistic practices take part in the partition of the perceptible insofar as they suspend the ordinary coordinates of sensory experience and reframe the network of relationships between spaces and times, subjects and objects, the common and the singular.

In this respect, Koblin’s projects are undoubtedly political, and yet my impression is that they could be pushed even further to effect that transformation of the partition of the sensible addressed by Ranciere. In particular, what seems to be missing from crowdsourcing art is a thorough reorganization of the relationship between the common and the singular. While the producers are many, anonymous, and greatly underpaid, the author(s) are few and well-individuated.

In fact, there is no doubt that the cultural capital artists draw from such projects is definitively more valuable than the modest sums they disburse to outsource their execution to a crowd. My critique, however, is not of a moral nature, but exquisitely political-i.e. why not to think of art projects that rely on the MTurk to transform the very practice of crowdsourcing on a material level?

I’ll leave it here for now, hoping that these reflections on the horizontal concatenation between the cognitive function of art with the pragmatic function of politics will spark a conversation on the subject.

The book recapitulates the couple’s memorable exploits, including their participation in the multiple-use nameLuther Blissett, the fake Nikeground campaign in Vienna, the poster ad for United We Stand, a fictitious film on the power dreams of the European Union, and their recent Synthetic Performances in Second Life.

The book also reveals the couple’s very first (and until now undisclosed) work: Stolen Pieces. From 1995 to 1997, the Matteses toured the world’s most important museums and stole dozens of fragments from well-known works by artists such as Duchamp, Kandinsky, Beuys and Rauschenberg. This work, which has remained a secret for 14 years, is revealed and discussed here for the very first time.

Texts by Domenico Quaranta, Bruce Sterling, RoseLee Goldberg, Wu Ming, Fabio Cavallucci, Maurizio Cattelan, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, Tilman Baumgärtel, Marco Deseriis and Matthew Mirapaul.

The last day Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1 was touring New York City’s colleges and bookstores to present the English translation of Manituana (Verso, 2009), Ashley Dawson, Gabriella Coleman, and I came together to interview him in Biella’s office on the 7th floor of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.

Roberto was in a good mood, as he had just learned that Altai, the latest effort of the Wu Ming collective (Einaudi 2009), is selling extremely well in Italy. The conversation touched upon a number of stimulating topics including Wu Ming’s process of collective writing, the relationship between the four Wu Mings and their community of readers, the collective’s authoring and communicative strategies, Manituana as an allegory of American exceptionalism, the difference between ‘technified myths’ and genuine myths, and the different apprehension of the notion of “popular culture” in Italy and the United States.

Ashley Dawson, whose work focuses on literature written in places once colonized by the British and is Associate Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island, has published the interview on the blog of Social Text.

‘We Get More Ambitious:’ An Interview with Wu Ming
By Ashley Dawson
November 30, 2009
Social Text

The Wu Ming Foundation is a collective of four self-described “guerrilla novelists” based in Bologna, Italy. The collective was born in 1994, when 
hundreds of European and South American artists, activists, and pranksters
 hijacked the name of a Black British football player who briefly played as a 
striker for AC Milan during the 1980s. 
Blissett, who left Italy after being subjected to racist taunts from
fans and players alike, metamorphosed into a multiple-use name or “open 
reputation” known as the Luther Blissett Project.

For their contribution to the Luther Blissett Project, the
 four writers who are now Wu Ming penned Q,
 an epic account of radical Anabaptist rebels in central Europe during the 16th
century. The novel became a 
bestseller in Italy, and has been translated into twelve languages. Q
 was published under Copyleft, allowing reproduction of the text for
non-commercial purposes three years before Creative Commons licenses were
 developed. In 1999, the year of Q’s publication, the Luther Blissett
 Project ended its five-year plan and dissolved itself. A year later, the authors of Q reconstituted themselves as the Wu 
Ming Foundation, choosing a Mandarin moniker that means “anonymous” and that
 pays tribute to Chinese dissidents, who often sign their demands for freedom of
speech with this tag. The
collective’s anonymity is also a conscious refusal of the cult of celebrity
that increasingly affects writing and culture in general.

The group’s first publication under
 their new name was 54, a novel that chronicles 
the adventures of Cary Grant after he decides to work for the British secret
 service, leading to a picaresque narrative in which the movie star travels to 
Yugoslavia to meet Marshall Tito. 
Members of the group have also each written “solo” novels. In addition, during the early part of
the decade, they played an important role in the anti-capitalist movement in
 Italy. Verso Books published their 
novel Manituana in English 
translation in spring 2009. Manituana tells the story of the
 American Revolution from the perspective of the Native Americans who side with
 the British Empire against the colonial army. The book is at the center of a complex trans-media storytelling
 project anchored by the Wu Ming Foundation’s website
. The
 group’s most recent novel, Altai, has
just been published to critical acclaim in Italy.

Interlocutors:

Wu Ming 1 [Wu]
Gabriella Coleman [GC] - a member of the Social Text collective
Ashley Dawson [AD] – a member of the Social Text collective
Marco Deseriis [MD] – a member of the Luther Blissett Project

AD: Can you tell us about the origin of the collective working method used 
by Wu Ming?

Wu: There is no fixed method. It changes over time, it evolves over time, and it depends on the nature of the book that we’re writing and the
transformations of our lives. For
 example, when we wrote Q, none of us
 were married. Now, we’re all
 married and three of us have children. 
What does that mean? It
 means that the way you organize your time is completely different. The way you put together a schedule of
work with the other members of the group is totally different. Which means that the method 
changes as well. There are some 
fixed features that don’t change; for example, the fact that we start from
 historical research. Before 
writing a single line, we study the period, we study the historical sources for
 months and months before developing a story. We start from a vague suggestion because we’re fascinated by 
a historical period or a particularly historical event, a macro-event like the
American Revolution, or the Reformation in the case of Q, or the Cold War, so we start to do research, going to libraries,
etc. Research is always the first 
stage of work. After that, we have 
notes and other material generated by the historical research, and we use it to
 play a kind of Role Playing Game. 
We sit around a table and we start to throw each other names and places 
and dates and small summaries of what happened in a particular place and time
 on the initiative of a particular character. We start to improvise stories. We’re interested in stories and connections, in linking 
stories. Things that took place in
 different regions and years — perhaps they have something in common, maybe we 
can find common causes and common outcomes of those events. We start to link them. This way we find that lumps of
narrative matter, as it were, start to take shape on the table. And we start playing with them like 
kids playing with clay, until we have a skeleton of the structure of the
novel. It’s not exactly a script,
 but it’s close to it.

Usually 
three quarters of the story is already clear in our minds, but not the
 ending. The ending must be a 
surprise for us, otherwise we wouldn’t have fun writing the novel. Then we divide the story into 
macro-sequences, each of which we divide into chapters. Usually we divide the sequences into 
many chapters, but most of our chapters are short. Long chapters are the exception, and readers always perceive 
a change of register, a change of tone, and a change of pace when, all of a 
sudden, there’s a long chapter. It
 signals something: a turning point in the novel. But most chapters are very short. And each one of us takes one chapter — we usually write four
chapters at a time because there are now four members in the collective — and,
once we’ve written them, we meet and read the chapters aloud and start
 discussing them. We then start 
improvising solutions to the problems that each one of us perceived in the text
 that’s being read aloud.

GC: Do you have the computer in front of you and make the changes right then? How are
 the new suggestions recorded?

Wu: No, it’s like music to us, it’s an aural experience. For us, it’s like 
listening to poetry. But there’s one
 member who’s in charge of each rewrite. 
The material keeps being reprocessed, keeps being rewritten, until it
 satisfies us all. And, once we’re
 satisfied, we store that particular chapter in the filone, our big file of completed drafts.

AD: So the decision about when chapters are finished is consensus based? What happens
 if one person digs their heels in?

Wu: We raise the stakes. We get more ambitious. We don’t find a lower ground for compromise. If one of us disagrees pig-headedly, it means that something 
isn’t working with the chapter, that it’s not radical enough, that it’s not
 ambitious enough. So we raise the
stakes with even bolder ideas, and usually it works. We look for a higher compromise not a lower one, a bolder
 synthesis not a settlement. But it 
changes over time, as I said initially. 
Sometimes the first stage of historical research is shorter, sometimes
we keep going with the research while we’re writing. That’s what happened with Manituana, but not with Q. When we wrote Q, we spent six months reading dozens and dozens of books on the 
Reformation, on the peasant wars, on radical movements in 16th
 century central Europe, on the Inquisition. And then for the next two and a half years we didn’t read
 anything else — we’d stored so much information that we felt …

GC: You publish using pseudonyms, and so I was wondering how the influence of some thinkers who write about the historical 
period makes its way into the text. 
There’s no mechanism for explicit citation, but there are clearly some 
thinkers you prefer over others.

Wu: Usually our political and philosophical ideas are so close to each other that there isn’t significant disagreement over the 
historical interpretation of the historical materials. We discuss the sources, we discuss
 interpretations written by historians, and usually we agree. We’re all Marxist by formation and 
education, and usually it’s rare that someone says, “I completely disagree with
 the fact that the peasant war was a class war.” There are some thinkers and historians who wrote important 
books on the subjects we’re researching, but unsurprisingly we don’t find their
 work very useful. For example, we 
didn’t use The Pursuit of the Millennium 
by Norman Cohen because it’s heavily influenced by a liberal — in the European,
conservative sense rather than the American, left-leaning one — interpretation
of what happened, and he sees Thomas Münzer and Jan of Leyden and other 
Anabaptist radicals as precursors to Adolph Hitler. Of course, we totally disagree, and we think that his
reconstruction of the facts is heavily biased by his political 
orientation. We used other historians
 such as Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi that seemed more useful to us. But there’s no big disagreement about 
possible historical interpretation of particular events.

GC: But is there an explicit way to register your influences? You do research just 
like us, so I wonder if there’s a way to mark out your influences in a way
 similar to that of an academic researcher?

Wu: But novelists have a different job. We have to keep the influences as hidden as possible, otherwise the novel would suck.

MD: Right, otherwise it would become an illustrated essay. I mean, if you read their 
novels there’s also the component of the thriller genre.

GC: And so educated readers can pick out these influences from the text and articulate them for others to see.

AD: Yes, and there’s a real collaborative aspect to your work with the broader public outside your collective. Can you talk about this a little about 
this?

Wu: We actively extend our collaborative stance to the wider community of our readers. 
Many of our readers send us contributions to the world that we build in our
 fictions, be it graphic novels or videos or music or any other kind of media,
language, and platform. This 
always happened, without our solicitation. It felt natural to people to do this. But with the publication of Manituana we made this collaborative 
project more explicit, and people keep sending us things. As recently as last week we received a new 
short story inspired by the novel.

MD: And you also use Google Earth.

Wu: Yes, it was pretty unusual at the time that we first did this, two years ago. We 
used Google Earth to allow readers to see the actual places where the action in
 Manituana was set, allowing people to 
re-explore the places where the action unfolds.

GC: Can you talk about your use of modified copyright license?

Wu: All our output is freely reproducible by any means. You can Xerox the books or 
download the books for free from our website. We’ve been doing this for fifteen years now. We started when we were involved in our 
former project, the Luther Blissett Project. Actually, our output then was completely anti-copyright. But when we published Q we had to protect our work in some
way. Had the book been completely 
anti-copyright, a movie producer could have stolen it, made a movie, made a lot
 of money without paying us, and strengthened his dominant position in the 
marketplace, which was of course the opposite of the outcome we had in mind
 when we started. So we used a 
modified copyright notice saying that reproduction is completely free for
 noncommercial purposes, but that commercial producers have to negotiate with us
 and pay us a share of the revenues. 
That was three years before Creative Commons licenses, which were rolled 
out in 2002, were devised.

MD: I’d like to focus on a potential contradiction here. The Einaudi publishing house 
with whom you publish your work was bought by the Mondadori Group, which is
 part of Berlusconi’s Mediaset company. 
Some activists say that it doesn’t matter that your work is
anti-copyright, because you’re still bringing profits to the enemy.

Wu: Einaudi is part of the Mondadori Group, and the main shareholder is Berlusconi’s Mediaset. But editorial control of Einaudi is not automatic, there’s always
conflict. And most Leftist writers 
decided to stay with Einaudi because it’s a treasure for the Left in Italy, and
 we didn’t want to leave that ground to the Right. We wanted to defend that ground, waiting for Berlusconi to 
die. Because I’m sure that Einaudi 
will still exist after Berlusconi is gone.

MD: So, using Gramscian terminology, you think that cultural hegemony trumps the political economy of the present?

Wu: I think so, in the long run. I think that the ownership of the publishing house by Mediaset is an important issue in the short term, while
 cultural hegemony is an investment in the long term. Not just Wu Ming, but many other authors are doing the same 
thing. And it’s also the best 
publisher in Italy. The Einaudi 
publishing house was founded in the 1930s under the fascist dictatorship. And they were an anti-fascist publisher 
under the dictatorship. The first
editorial board was arrested and some of them were beaten to a bloody pulp and 
even killed in prison, so they have a tradition that Berlusconi can’t
 appropriate. He can fuck with it,
but he can’t appropriate it.

AD: I want to ask you a very different question, one about history. Postcolonial theorists
spend a lot of time worry about the politics of representation, particular of 
the subaltern whose voices, strictly speaking, are lost to history. Is this an issue you worry about,
particularly when writing a book like Manituana?

Wu: But our books are never only from the perspective of the defeated, the subaltern. 
It’s more nuanced, more complex than that. For example, in Altai,
our latest novel, we describe the war on Cyprus, the siege of Famagosta, and
the battle of Lepanto, from the perspective of the Turks. They won the war. But, being the victor on the field 
doesn’t mean that you’re the victor in public memory. For example, the Vietnamese War was won by the Viet Cong,
but how many books do you know of from that perspective? We always look at the Vietnam War from
 the perspective of the West and American point of view, even if the US was the
 loser in that war. Military defeat 
doesn’t mean defeat in the real war: the war for public memory. So who is the subaltern in this case?

MD: In the case of Native Americans, in Manituana that is, how do you relate to this issue?

Wu: It’s tricky there, because the Native Americans side with the Empire, with King George III – a powerful empire, an occupation
 army. They fought with this side,
which for them was the right side to fight with because they had foreseen their 
fate under the new rule. George
Washington had genocidal strategies against them. Scorched earth campaigns, like the Sullivan Expedition. There are the explicit orders that
 George Washington sent to Major Sullivan, and we insert these orders into the
 novel as a real document, and he explicitly ordered genocide. What was at stake was the possibility 
for white settlers to conquer Indian land – that was one of the reasons for the 
Revolution, actually. So, okay, in 
a way they are the subalterns, they are the vanishing Indians, the defeated,
 but they sided with the most powerful at that moment, because in 1775 the
 British Empire was the most powerful side. They weren’t fighting with the underdog, they were fighting 
with the Empire. We intentionally
chose such a tricky situation, a complex and entangled situation where 
distinctions are very subtle, because we didn’t want to simply reverse the
 official versions of the American Revolution, and make the good villains and
 the villains good. That was too 
simplistic. We weren’t interested
 in that. We wanted to show how 
complex the situation was. So it’s
multifaceted and there are several points of view. We always switch points of view. In Altai it’s even 
more hypnotizing. The continual 
reversal of point of view. Who’s
 the real subaltern there? Who’s
the real loser? It’s not easy to
 answer that question.

MD: And in Manituana, it’s complicated by the fact that the Iroquois federation is made up of six
 nations, one of which betrayed the others.

Wu: Right, the Oneida sort of betrayed the Mohawks. In fact, the Six Nations never found a consensus on the war. The Mohawk 
and Seneca sided with the Empire, the Onondaga and Tuscarora remained neutral,
while most Oneida helped the rebels. 
The Continental Army put such pressure on the six nations that they 
effectively destroyed the federation. 
Siding with the rebels didn’t do the Oneida much good. The Mohawks, in contrast, were rewarded 
by the Crown with lands north of the border, in Canada. They resettled there. At the end of Manituana, there were only about 300 Mohawks left in the entire
continent. Now, there are about
 40,000.

MD: Did you meet any of them?

GC: And how did they react to Manituana?

Wu: It’s really too soon to know how they’ll react to the novel since it’s just been published in English. But when we described our project to the guy in charge of
 the Joseph Brant museum in Brantford, Ontario, he was very pleased. We sent him a copy of the book, but 
it’s too soon…

I was at the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation in 2001, but for completely different reasons. Before we got the idea of writing Manituana, because the Mohawks had to help us – and by us, I mean a
group of activists heading towards Quebec City where there was the FTAA
Summit. Many activists were
converging for a counter-summit. 
There was a rally in Burlington, Vermont, and someone had the idea of
crossing into Canada through the Mohawk reservation at Akwesasne. It was a symbolic gesture: continuing 
between the Mohawk struggle and the struggle against the FTAA. So there were some Mohawk activists who 
were supposed to help us cross the border into Canada, because half of
 Akwesasne is in the US and half is in Canada, and they can cross the border
 whenever they want. But this 
failed, because Canada had closed the border there. So I and some other Italian activists travelled east to
 cross the border. That was when I 
was in direct contact with Mohawk activists. I remember there was a guy with a megaphone and he kept 
saying, “Everything has to be very peaceful. Don’t fuck with the rules of our community. Everything has to be very 
peaceful. My brother is in prison 
and the FBI is constantly harassing us, so please don’t do anything that can
 put us in jeopardy. Everything 
will be very peaceful.” Three days 
later, he was in Quebec City throwing stones at the cops. He said, “I’m not on my land here, I 
don’t need to be peaceful.” It was 
very funny!

Then, after Manituana, two of us went on a pilgrimage to Brantford, to Kingston, where Molly Brant’s tomb is, and to the big Mohawk reservation called 
Six Nations, and we wrote a travelogue that was published last year in Italian;
 it’s called Grand River.

GC: I’m intrigued by the way that the novel is multi-layed and works on different layers. I’m interested, in terms of activism, in the idea of
 creating pleasure as well as giving a message.

Wu: Yes, our novels work on different levels. No, forget that: our novels operate on different levels. I don’t want to be arrogant; it isn’t up to us to say whether they work or not. It’s true: many people read our novels
 as if they’re just cloak-and-dagger historical fictions. But others see the level of political
 allegory. But most people read 
them on both levels, and constantly shift from one level to the other. I think you enjoy them more if you’re 
aware of both levels. And they
have to be readable and pleasurable. 
There’s language experimentation, it’s true, but always in the service
of the story. We think that 
experimentation is good, but only if it serves the story, not if it’s in and of 
itself. We’re not interested in 
stylistic experiments in and of themselves. It’s not our cup of tea. There are other writers who can do this. It’s not our mission.

MD: Can you talk about Manituana in terms of political allegory relating to the War in Iraq.

Wu: Right, because we started from a journalistic metaphor that was used in the weeks prior to the shock and awe bombing that began the
war in Iraq. This metaphor was
”the Atlantic Ocean is widening,” with reference to the difference of opinion 
between the US and Europe about the necessity of attacking Iraq, about the
 complicity of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the attacks of 9/11, and about Saddam
 having hidden weapons of mass destruction. There was complete disagreement at the UN about this. And in Europe, most of the public, even
 the right wing, was against attacking Iraq. For instance, in Italy 50% of the people are explicitly
fascist, but if I remember the figure correctly 92% of them were against the
war in Iraq. This marked a big 
difference with what was going on in the US at the time. The same was true throughout
Europe. And many newspaper
articles kept talking about the widening gap between the EU and the US, one 
that was never so great as at that moment. So we began to reflect on the history of the relationship 
between the US and Europe. And of 
course the beginning of that relationship was with the American Revolution and
 the birth of the US as a separate country. At the beginning, the project was different. We wanted to write a novel set in 1876,
exactly one century after the revolution. 
But one set in a parallel reality in which George Washington had been 
defeated. This involved 
reinventing a completely different reality, which was very difficult to handle,
to the extent that we weren’t able to imagine the changes that would be
necessary. So we came
 independently to a conclusion: why imagine an alternate reality when the
 American Revolution itself contains so many different realities, depending on
the different point of view that you choose? If you choose the point of view of Native Americans, the
 American Revolution is something totally different. It’s something really far away from what one expects. So we decided to write a novel set in
1775, at the beginning of the revolution, and lasting the whole course of the
war, until the Treaty of Paris, when the British Empire acknowledges the existence
 of the US as a separate country.

AD: And so having written the novel, what do you make of the discourse of American exceptionalism?

Wu: It’s the birth of American exceptionalism; it’s reflected in all the discourses and conversations that you find in the novel.

AD: But did your perspective on these questions change in the writing?

Wu: I don’t know what we thought at the beginning. It’s the curse of
knowledge, that when you know something you don’t remember how it was not to
 know it. But it’s a book on 
American exceptionalism, seen from Europe. There are some conversations in the London section of the 
novel that are deeply allegorical of American exceptionalism, seen from a
 European perspective. And American 
exceptionalism is still there; Obama is an exceptionalist like Bush. Of course, the politics are different,
but the exceptionalist assumptions are still there: the key role that America
has to play on the world stage, etcetera. 
”We are the chosen ones” is the subtext underlying every discourse,
whether it’s Bush or Obama.

MD: I want to come back to the issue of the co-production of your work with your readers, and to expanding the network of
the novels into a kind of social practice that is shared. I’d like you to discuss the
relationship you have with your readers through different media, and the
theoretical reflections you develop on this relationship through your
interaction with Henry Jenkins — you wrote the introduction to the Italian 
translation of Convergence Culture — 
and your sense of the difference between mass culture and popular culture.

Wu: Okay, my brother is a Trekkie. He’s got all the DVD boxes of every TV episode and movie. He even has a 
pin that you hit and it says “Beam me up, Scotty.” I like Star Trek myself, but I’m not so obsessed. But he’s one of the key members of the
 Star Trek use-net group in Italian. 
Anyway, I bumped into Jenkins’ analysis Star Trek-related fan fiction,
especially of the slash sub-genre — with the homosexual relationship between 
Kirk and Spock — years ago. And 
then I read about Convergence Culture,
where he relates fan fiction to Pierre Lévy’s theories of collective
 intelligence. In the 1990s, I had 
read all of Pierre Lévy’s books, and one of the Wu Ming collective is the son
 of Pierre Lévy’s first publisher in Italian, a small publisher called Synergon, based in Bologna, that went bankrupt
after a few years, but thanks to their work I’d met Lévy in Bologna. That was the connection: Star Trek on
the one side, and Pierre Lévy on the other. Wu Ming always moves in that middle terrain! I ordered Convergence Culture and, when I read it, found many confirmations
of the things we’ve been doing since the Luther Blissett days. He described practices and communities
that bore many resemblances with what the Luther Blissett Project had been and
with what Wu Ming was, and especially the community of readers around us. He described communities of readers and 
fans, and described especially their creativity, the way they creatively and
 positively interact; they weren’t passive consumers but kept modifying the text
that they received. This bore many 
resemblances with what had always been happening around us.

So I wrote an email to Jenkins saying that I really enjoyed the book but that it 
ignored the context in Europe. Fan
 culture doesn’t happen only in America. 
And I explained that the European counter-parts of these American fan 
cultures are more aware of themselves and more politically active. Because that’s the difference between
the two scenes. The distinction
 between the realm of popular culture and the realm of radical politics is not 
so sharp in Italy as in the US, it’s more blurred. The Luther Blissett Project was both radical politics and 
popular culture. Jenkins was 
intrigued by this and wrote back saying that he’d read our material and would
 like to interview us. It’s a very 
long and thorough interview that he published on his blog. Then we translated the interview and
put it up on Carmilla, one of the most popular literary blogs in Italy. Then, an Italian publisher saw this and 
decided to publish a translation of Jenkins’ book, and asked us to write a
preface.

MD: So you can talk about the difference between the US approach to convergence culture and your own?

Wu: Yeah, he states that popular culture and mass culture are two different things. He 
says that “popular culture” is a much more complex concept than “mass 
culture,” and I agree with his opinion. Popular culture doesn’t necessarily have to be mass culture 
in order to be popular culture. 
Because now we are witnessing a personalization of the cultural flow, a
 partial demassification of the cultural flow, a crisis of the culture industry,
 and a downsizing of the mainstream. 
The mainstream is just another niche, it’s just bigger than the
 others. So, in the 1960s you could 
talk about mass culture. Nowadays, 
there are some aspects that are mass culture, but there’s a popular culture
 that’s not necessarily mass. 
People listening to techno probably are not a big mass, but that’s par t
of popular culture because their behavior is affected by the dynamics and 
practices that are diffused in the popular realm. This is a distinction that we make in our preface. Because in Italian these concepts are
 even more tricky since there’s no such expression as folk culture in Italian. We often translate “popular culture” with cultura popolare, but that expression
 usually describes pre-industrial folk culture. Because popolo is the folk, or else has more
 political connotations, you hear the word and think of the French Revolution.

MD: But doesn’t the popular culture still have a certain standardization built into it? 
For example, blogs on Wordpress are still built on a common 
template. Yes, people produce
their own culture, but the template is the same.

Wu: Yeah, too few people tinker with the template. You can do this if you
want. For example, for the Altai blog, we took a template and 
completely turned it upside down. 
It doesn’t even look like it was before we intervened. But too few people challenge their 
place in the grid.

GC: But I think we’re going to see a proliferation of templates and platforms. In fact,
I think we already are seeing that. 
There was a moment within net politics and culture when you had Usenet
and webpages, and it was pretty stable. 
Then, with social media, things proliferate. And I think we’re only seeing the beginning of that. And all this has implications for
content, because what you’re noting is that the template does constrain the
content and genre as well.

AD: I want to come back to the question of how your practice as a collective relates to the shifting character of the Italian Left.

Wu: “Shifting character” is a euphemism. I would describe it as lemming-like suicide. I probably would need an
 external point of view to tell if our practices have changed in reaction to the 
Italian Left. But I can be more 
specific and explain how our approach to myth making has changed after the
 defeat of the anti-capitalist movement in Genoa. We were deeply involved in that movement. We were seen kind of as organic 
intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, which we refused, but it’s not something
that you choose. It’s decided by other 
people. We made several framing
 mistakes, because we tried to use myths in order to rebuild the imaginary, the
 set of metaphors and images traditionally used by the anti-capitalist
movement. We went backwards and
 completely skipped the 20th century, and made direct reference to
pre-modern uprisings and rebellions. 
We metaphorically described the movement from Seattle to Genoa as though 
it were a peasant uprising. Which,
in many part of the world, it was, in Brazil or in Chiapas, even in France with
the Confédération Paysanne. A new kind of peasant riot, against
genetically modified organisms and such. 
When you see a French peasant destroying a McDonalds with a tractor,
that’s a peasant riot.

But, we exaggerated, we pushed the whole thing too far, and overused this metaphor of the peasants besieging the
castle. Of course, there were 
summits like the G8 and the World Bank and the IMF meeting in Prague that were
 metaphorically speaking, the castle. 
Because the powerful of the planet met in a heavily garrisoned place,
with many, many cops armed to the teeth surrounding the area, so that was the
 castle. But we weren’t really 
besieging it, because that was only a formal manifestation of capitalist
 power. Real capitalist power is a
flow of electrons, going from one stock exchange to another. It’s completely immaterial. And so we weren’t besieging the powers 
that be, because the powers that be are always somewhere else. We were besieging a ceremony, a
 symbolic moment. But at Genoa, we
found out that we were the ones being besieged. We were exterminated, exactly like medieval peasants in
their uprisings. Of course, there 
was only one dead, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people injured, 
people tortured in secret cells. 
And there are still people on trial, nine years later. For having broken some store windows, 
six demonstrators were convicted to thirteen years of prison two weeks 
ago. We’re still suffering the
consequences of that misconception. 
We weren’t the besiegers. 
We found ourselves besieged. 
We had chosen the wrong metaphor.

We wrote a kind of edict. A long prose poem, which was entitled From the Multitudes of Europe, Rising Up Against the Empire, and Marching Towards
Genoa. We claimed the heritage 
of medieval uprisings. It was very
successful as a text. It helped
 convince many people to go to Genoa. 
But from an ideological political point of view, it was completely wrong. Because we were evoking an Imaginary of
defeat and bloody repression, and backwardness, in a way, because we were
identifying with peasants whose mentality was still too narrow, actually, if we
look at them from a more detached point of view, because they fell into every
trap that was set against them by the powers that be. In Q, we show how
 Thomas Münzer made an incredible mistake because he went to the field battle,
he wanted to have the final battle of the army of the just against the army of
the unjust, the army of evil, and they all went to Frankenhausen and they were
all exterminated by the cavalry and by the Landsknechts. Because they chose their enemies’
ground, where they couldn’t prevail in any way. And so we framed the whole campaign for going to Genoa in
the wrong way. One of the
consequences was that we were flabbergasted when bloody repression broke out in
 Genoa. Which was very naïve of us
 — we should have expected this!

MD: There were many signals before Genoa coming from the government, explicitly mentioning death as a possibility for demonstrators.

Wu: Yeah, but we chose to ignore them because we thought they were just trying to scare us. But it was already written in our manifesto, “We are the 
Hussites,” and the Hussites were bloodily repressed in a field battle. “We are the Taborites,” and they were
 repressed. All of these groups
 made the mistake of choosing one day and one place for a final
 confrontation. But there’s no 
final confrontation because you are not besieging the powers that be. Because you can’t corner power that way 
today.

GC: And it points to the contradictions of the anti-capitalist movement, which became a victim of its success. The movement needs to learn how to deal with success, which 
is difficult, because you don’t know what the reaction to your success is going
 to be. We were just thrilled at 
how we were becoming more public, as opposed to thinking about what kind of
responses would be provoked by our increasing success. This points to the shortcomings of not
 being able to note the way that success works against you.

Wu: Yes, the trouble is that you miss the moment, and then it’s too late.

GC: But it is conceivable to think of this as a political tactic, to note the tactic of success and then think about the kind
of repression that’s going to follow.

AD: So are you writing a manifesto for Copenhagen?

Wu: No, absolutely not. No technified myths. Because we use the distinction made by the famous mythologist Károly
 Kerényi between genuine myth and technified myth. Genuine myth is spontaneous, while technified myth is 
engineered. For example,
 references to the Roman Empire made by the fascist dictatorship during the
1930s were a kind of technified myth. 
But so was our manifesto, which made an artificial myth for the
movement. And that was the
mistake.

AD: So what would you say is an example of an organic myth associated with the global justice movement?

Wu: Movements have to devise their own mythologies, with no separate groups trying to do it. 
Because the problem is specialization. At a certain moment, we were perceived as the specialists of
myth making for the movement.

MD: Yes, and this is also because the press always wants to find a specialist, so when you want to talk about culture and the
global movement, Wu Ming is the voice in Italy in the movement.

Wu: Right, and the problem arises with this specialization, because when you become a specialized group your myth doesn’t
arise from the movement but you take it from outside.

MD: My experience is with the impact of the Zapatistas, which became a kind of myth in Italy. And another example of this mythmaking is the experience of
the white overalls [tute bianche],
which become the disobedients [disobbedienti]. I participated in some actions in Rome 
when the group was still very open — around 1996. The idea was that you’d put on a white overall and do a
 direct action with a bunch of people. 
The group was still open at that point. But then it developed into an organization that had to have
 spokespeople in each city. The 
white overalls brought 50,000 people to Genoa. And it was incredible to see social centers from Rome that 
came from a completely different political and social orientation putting on
 white overalls and following along at Genoa, following this idea that we had to
 go and break down the castle walls. 
But it was really like Gaza — the army bombarded them.

Wu: Right. In fact, they tortured us, keeping hundreds of activists for three days
 in secret jail cell.

MD: Why don’t we close with discussion of the Luther Blissett project and how all these people with different names collaborated in
 various ways.

AD: Yes, I’m interested in your refusal of the cult of the author.

GC: I also think that this is important to note because in the world of radical tech
activism, when Web 2.0 started happening and people could become a celebrity to 
a small number of people, a number of radical tech activists — I call them 
’fallen angels’ — moved to Web 2.0 because they were seduced by the possibility
 of amassing a celebrity audience.

Wu: Your public image can become a burden, not only for you but also for your readers. 
When I’m recognized by someone, there’s no mediating image. There’s only one way you can look at me 
and say that I’m a member of Wu Ming: by having been present at one of our
performances. I don’t like the 
jargon of authenticity, but nevertheless I think this relation is more
 authentic. We interact in a more 
horizontal way, because we interact physically. The only way to interact with my image is to be in the same 
room with me. Also, I can walk 
into a shop in Bologna without being the famous writer entering a store. I can be a famous writer entering a 
store and nobody bothers me. 
Whereas, if Umberto Eco walks into a store in Bologna, everyone’s 
whispering about him. But I can 
avoid that. Although I’m a 
bestselling author, my face is not everywhere, it’s not detached from me.

But this was an evolution of Luther Blisset, of course, because in Luther Blissett no one ever appeared as himself 
or herself. You were always part
of this open reputation that was constantly improved by the actions of many 
people, and these people were always invisible, literally and metaphorically
speaking, because the most important thing was adding further to the reputation
of this strange bandit, a Robin Hood of the information age, that was what
 Luther Blissett was for 5 years. 
So, when we started Wu Ming, we retained some elements of the Luther
 Blissett Project, one of which was not appearing in the media: no photos, no TV
appearances. They keep trying, and
we always say no. Of course, we
 can’t prevent people taking photos of us during readings, and sometimes it 
happens, but mostly people respect our choice. But the most important thing is that I don’t pose for 
photographs and I don’t go on TV.

MD: And yet Luther Blissett had a face; what kind of face was that and why was it needed?

Wu: Yes, there were three great-great uncles of mine and a great-aunt, portraits from the 1930s, and we morphed them. It took a whole afternoon, but in the 
end there was a face. But the real 
Luther Blissett was black. At the 
beginning, the real Luther Blissett was baffled by us, but then in the end he
 accepted it and was enthusiastic about it.

Date:
Friday, November 20, 2009
7:00pm

Location:
BlueStockings
172 Allen St
New York, NY

Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors, “a band of guerrilla novelists” whom have collaboratively written several novels, including 54 (2002), Manituana (2009), and, under the pseudonym of Luther Blissett, Q (1999).

The novel “Manituana,” recently published by Verso in the UK and the United States, is the newest of Wu Ming’s collectively authored books. It was written between 2003-2007, and is the first of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy set during the firmament of the American Revolution.

The book is set during the Revolutionary War. This novel blends fact and fiction in a story that centers on a New World family of mixed British and Native American descent. The Johnson-Brant clan lives in a world that is familiar but not immediately of its time: hunter-gathering and Indian cosmology are part of a way of life that also includes violin-playing and living in stone houses rather than teepees. With fleeting glimpses of historical figures, set-piece battle narratives, and epic wilderness scenes, Manituana weaves the chaos of the civil war and the founding of a new nation into a story on the heroic scale of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and with a cult appeal similar to Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

The Internet as Playground and Factory – Stephanie Rothenberg from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.

Co-created by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, “Invisible Threads – Double Happiness Jeans” is a mixed reality performance-installation, which explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans “sweatshop” in Second Life that manufacturers real world, wearable jeans on-demand.

Using a just-in-time production process, customers in the real world are able to purchase their jeans directly from the manufacturer, Double Happiness. A microphone and web cam connected to a computer creates a live stream of customer orders into the virtual factory. The webcam stream, projected inside the factory enables SL workers to see each customer and hear their order. On the assembly line, the first worker starts the production process that involves loading cotton bales into the Jaquard loom. Once the fabric is made it moves down the assembly line through each machine. Each worker stationed at a machine is responsible for selecting the correct option based on the customer’s order, men’s or women’s size for example. At the end of the production process, the jeans go through the SL to real life “portal” resulting in an output from a large format printer. Customers watch their jean orders being produced in real time in the factory via a computer projection in the physical space. Once in the real world, the jeans made from cotton canvas require simple assembly before being worn.

The project has been commissioned by Turbulence.org, and implemented in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book in 2008. After an international committee selected five chapters, the editors, Jo Anne Greene, Helen Thorington (Turbulence) and Eduardo Navas, invited new authors, including myself, to contribute new chapters to the book.

At the moment seven authors and three editors are holding a stimulating conversation on the potentialities of collaborative writing and networked editing on the empire mailing list, with the goal of collecting feedback from potential readers and inviting new contributors to participate.

Everyone can post comments on any of the existing chapters. Mine, titled “No End In Sight: Networked Art as a Participatory form of Storytelling” is available at http://deseriis.networkedbook.org.