Introduction to Digital Media

By Marco Deseriis | September 23, 2009

I have begun teaching a new class called Introduction to Digital Media, and I have to say I am amazed by the quality of my students and their interest in the class. The class is running a collaborative Wordpress blog, which can be found here .

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Critical Strategies in Art and Media

By Marco Deseriis | August 29, 2009

Roundtable conference of digital theorists and practitioners on the future
of cultural intelligence and freedoms

With:
Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire
Pentecost, Peter Lamborn Wilson

Moderators:
Konrad Becker/World-Information Institute
Jim Fleming /Autonomedia

Location:
Austrian Cultural Forum (ACF)
11 East 52nd St
New York, NY 10022
http://www.acfny.org

Date & Time:
September 10, 2009
1:30-6:30pm   7:00-9:00pm

Admission is free!

http://world-information.org/wii

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Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation in the Coming Century

By Marco Deseriis | August 28, 2009

SEPTEMBER 3-6, 2 0 0 9

A seminar with Franco Berardi “Bifo” organized by 16beaver group, autonomedia, and minor compositions.

http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/

We are pleased to invite you to participate in a seminar with Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) this September at 16Beaver. Tentatively titled Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation in the Coming Century, Bifo has suggested that we focus our energies and inquiry for these four days on questions of subjectivation and autonomy.

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Picture the Homeless Tent City

By Marco Deseriis | August 14, 2009

On July 23, 2009 Brooklyn-based art&activism collective Not An Alternative and Picture The Homeless, an organization founded and led by homeless people in New York City, teamed up to occupy a vacant lot in East Harlem owned by JPMorgan Chase.

Here is a New York Times article telling the story of the action, and here is a video in two parts, which shows quite clearly how the activists made a smart use of a fake fashion shoot to cut the fence and enter the lot in full daylight:

more about "Not An Alternative", posted with vodpod

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Video of Bifo / MacKenzie Wark Event

By Marco Deseriis | April 15, 2009

Two weeks ago I have introduced this brilliant conversation between Italian philosopher Franco Berardi Bifo and Australian-American new media theorist McKenzie Wark (see announcement in the previous post).

Bifo begins with the experience of Radio Alice, to touch on cognitive labor (what he calls the “cognitariat”), the capitalist exploitation and ‘pathologization’ of the human soul (understood as an ensemble of intellectual and emotional faculties), and the scarce utility of the term “alienation” — a “trap-word” which presupposes for him the existence of an authentic, truthful, essential condition of mankind.

In order to escape the trappings of alienation (and the heavy political and philosophical baggage that this term carries on), Bifo proposes the use of another term, “suffering,” which renders the process whereby individuals, immersed as they are in an information environment which is increasingly accelerated, overloaded, and competitive, go through cycles of panic and depression through which they disconnect from the social body and disinvest from the social relationship.

To heal this isolating cycle, Bifo suggests, quoting Deleuze and Guattari, that friendship is the bridge that allows us to walk over the abyss of nonsense, of what cannot be put into language…

Here is the video of the conversation:

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Of the Danger of Love, Refusal of Work, and the Beauty of Autonomy

By Marco Deseriis | March 30, 2009

-Proliferating and losing oneself. This was the sense of the collective enterprise that the movement was attempting in Italy at the time. –Franco Berardi


Please join The Change You Want To See Gallery for a conversation with renowned philosopher, media activist and cultural agitator Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) and media theorist MacKenzie Wark, author of Gamer Theory and A Hacker’s Manifesto.

Bifo has been a pivotal figure in Italian social movements for that past 40 years. He co-founded the legendary Radio Alice (1977), the first pirate radio station in Italy, the magazine A/Traverso (1977-81), and Rekombinant (2000), an online network environment that focuses on radical philosophy, urban conflicts, media activism, networking art, knowledge economy, western psychopathology, autonomous universities, and institutions of the common. More recently he produced the autonomous street television network Orfeo TV (2002), which sparked a national network of pirate micro TV stations to counter the media monopoly of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

This event marks the long awaited publication of the first two Bifo’s books in English: Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008); and Ethereal Shadows: Communication and Power in Contemporary Italy (with Marco Jacquemet and Gianfranco Vitali, Autonomedia, 2009).

The evening will be moderated by Marco Deseriis, member of Not An Alternative and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.

The Change You Want To See Gallery
Monday, March 30th, 7:30pm (free)
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave

Brooklyn, NY 11211

L to Bedford; G to Metropolitan; J/M/Z to Marcy

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Radars & Fences II: Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology

By Marco Deseriis | February 27, 2009

Radars & Fences II is a conference featuring five researchers and artists who have been at the forefront of the battle for the democratization of the life sciences over the last decade: Beatriz da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Richard Pell, Claire Pentecost, and Paul Vanouse will present their own work and discuss with the public models of interdisciplinary engagement at the beginning of the “biological century.”

Genterra
Critical Art Ensemble with Beatriz da Costa, Genterra, 2001-03

Event Time

Thursday, March 5, 2009
4:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Location

NYU School of Law
Information Law Institute
40, Washington Square South
Room 218

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Concerning Art and Social Change

By Marco Deseriis | February 18, 2009

By Marco Deseriis and Brian Holmes

(Originally published by Mute Magazine)

The 2007 reader Art and Social Change offers a genealogy of today’s radical cultures. Here, Brian Holmes and Marco Deseriis glean insights from the book into today’s dilemma of producing critical culture within recuperative ‘ semiocapitalism’

Among the groundswell of books investigating the link between aesthetics and politics, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader is particularly ambitious. Published in 2007 as a companion volume to the historical survey exhibition Forms of Resistance at the Vanabbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland, the book features a wide-ranging collection of texts and manifestos, divided into four sections corresponding to four major watersheds in contemporary social and political history: the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the social uprisings of 1968, and the 1989 revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc.

Editors Will Bradley and Charles Esche have completed the anthology by inviting six contemporary critics (Geeta Kapur, Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina Vishmidt, and Tirdad Zolghadr) to provide both a historical context and an interpretation for some of the readings. However, the interpretative framework remains light enough that the core of the project resides in the selection of historical documents produced by the artists and activists themselves.

Poster by Emory Douglas

Image: Poster by Emory Douglas

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Networked: A (networked book) about (networked art). Proposal #1

By Marco Deseriis | December 15, 2008

This is my application for two separate chapters of Networked: A (networked book) about (networked art), a multi-authored and co-edited book commissioned by Turbulence.

Proposals
PROPOSAL #1
PROPOSAL #2

Three Writing Samples
* Text Virus (Downloadable PDF excerpted from Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, MIT Press, 2008)
* Beyond Hypernarratives (Downloadable excerpt from the 2008 Introduction to Marco Deseriis and Giuseppe Marano, Net.Art: L’Arte della Connessione, Milan, IT: Shake, 2003-2008)
* Art and/or Revolution (Link to a review of Gerald Raunig’s Art and Revolution, Metamute, October 2008)

Curriculum Vitae

PROPOSAL #1

Proposed Title
Beyond Hypernarratives: Network Art as a Participatory Form of Storytelling

Keywords
Networked storytelling, oral culture, pragmatic and denotative knowledge, hypernarratives, machinic text, code, authorship, distribution, net.art, hacking, activism, Toywar.

Abstract
What is a networked narrative? In what respect does it differ from a hypernarrative? And “what is an author” when a text is no longer attached to a physical support, but it is processed and formatted through layers and layers of code? This chapter of Networked tries to tackle these difficult questions by arguing that there exists a set of online narratives which revive the unity of pragmatic and denotative knowledge that once belonged to oral culture.

Networked storytelling entails the mobilization of aesthetic, political and technological competences in that it does not limit itself to tell a story, nor does it simply features multiple authors. Networked storytelling relies on the activation of a number of network nodes and components by mobilizing multiple skills such as designing, organizing, writing, performing, composing, playing, and programming in the dissemination of a story across a variety of channels.

In other words, a networked narrative may described not only as a cultural object, but as a machinic process holding together individuals and communities who share a unifying objective or believe in a plausible promise. The last part of the chapter will address the issue of network narratives’ radical contingency, and of their possible transmutation once common targets and unifying objectives are no longer available.

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Networked: A (networked book) about (networked art). Proposal #2

By Marco Deseriis | December 15, 2008

Proposed Title
Against Representation: From the Aesthetics of the Machinic to the Aesthetics of Social Machines

Keywords
Aesthetics of the machinic, dematerialization, virtualization, Concept art, telecommunication art, net.art, software art, programming, code, social software, locative media, aesthetics of social machines

Abstract
By using the concept of the aesthetics of the machinic as a broad heuristic to group a range of network practices, this chapter of Networked starts off by claiming that network art emerged from the intersection of two distinct trajectories: 1) The dematerialization and virtualization of art set off by Concept art; 2) The dematerialization and virtualization of many-to-many communication set off by the growing availability of analog and digital networks.

After demonstrating that beginning in the late 1960s/early 1970s the meeting of the avantgarde tradition and the new media has generated new forms of art known as telecommunication art, net.art and software art, the chapter considers more recent examples of network art that leverage the “brainware” of the internet to address and incorporate a wide range of social and urban interactions as their primary materials.

The transition from the aesthetics of the machinic to the aesthetics of social machines is caught historically, i.e. the implosion of the NASDAQ in 2001, and the emergence of locative media and the Web 2.0 mark the end of the utopian expectations in the transformative power of the internet, and of the self-referential phase of networking which marked the late 1990s net.art and hacktivism.

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