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No mediation: Re-imagining democracy through art
While the political institutions of contemporary Western democracies are currently facing a crisis of representation, art is increasingly associated with the explosion of novel democratic mediums, forms and processes. From YouTube to Flickr, from graffiti to street art, new media are opening up the field of art to processes of “democratization” of the means of creative expression allowing more and more people –indeed, potentially everyone- to become an artist. The exhaustively discussed relationship between ‘art and power’ seems to have finally missed the conjunction ‘and’: art is in itself becoming a space of democratic experimentation in multiple ways. Art works are focusing on new micropolitical and biopolitical themes, they are inventing new forms of creativity, and are constructing new social networks. The special issue aims to address this potentially new relationship between art and democracy.
Blixa Bargeld – All (is) open again
Blixa Bargeld discusses Einsturzende Neubauten’s new project which is being released without any kind of record label involvement. The project involves a series of experimentations: the recordings were financed by their supporters who could also view the album as it was being created via webcam and could have live online discussions with the band about the recording.
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Peter Lunenfeld – Dispatches from the front: Battling for meaning in the war between downloading and uploading
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There is no end to the ways in which meaningful culture is more meaningful than mindless production, no matter how participatory, argues Peter Lunenfeld. |
Eyal Weizman – Beyond colonialism: Israeli/Palestinian space
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Architect Eyal Weizman discusses his new book, Hollow Land – an exploration of the political space created by Israel’s occupation as a laboratory of advanced capitalist colonialism in which the actions of the Israeli military, humanitarian workers, settlers, and different groups of the colonised themselves are intertwined, forming intense relationships. |
Ryan Griffis – For an art against the cartography of everyday life
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Although locative media purports to provide tools for the creation and reception of counter-archives, providing a seemingly emancipatory shift toward self-representation, it is necessary to consider the affective qualities of the technology itself, says Ryan Griffis. |
Ana Betancour – Reclaiming places of culture
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The development or regeneration of contemporary European cities is far from being a smooth process. Focusing on the city of Barcelona, Ana Betancour raises the difficult questions of which cultural groups are being represented in these projects, by who and for whom? Who makes choices that shape the city, where and how do these operate?. |
Arlen Dilsizian – Seeing beyond rebellious artistic practices
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Arlen Dilsizian cautions against interpreting graffitti as a collective, homogenous whole and claims that its ability to inspire people who have never thought about producing art, to do so (however briefly) is its most radically important gesture. |
Matteo Stocchetti – Re-thinking the political in the age of ambivalence: Art, new media and democratic politics
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Matteo Stocchetti claims that the ‘democratization of art’ and ‘political democratization’ are two different processes and we should be careful not to confuse the two. |