How does digital culture shape art and politics? Digital technologies have marked a seismic shift in our conceptions of power as it has become increasingly diffuse and participatory. This transformation in the nature of power has posed significant challenges to traditional ways of envisioning radical art and politics as gestures of transgression and refusal inherited from 20th-century avant-garde aesthetics and revolutionary politics appear short-lived and easily co-opted.
This course explores how the digital has influenced contemporary approaches to tactical media art and interventionism. It surveys politico-aesthetic practices in the “post-digital” era, with particular attention to artists and theorists engaged in experimental and minoritarian traditions. Together we’ll confront the shifting ground of artistic resistance in a landscape of protest, pranksterism, hacktivism, and obfuscation to ask what strategies of disruption and refusal remain imaginable today.
Our exploration will be guided by these questions:
- What role does the digital play in theorizations of contemporary power (e.g., “control,” “neoliberalism,” “platform capitalism”)? How have digital technologies reshaped and informed understandings of how dominance works today?
- How have the artists, digital interventionists, and critics we examine articulated the challenges and limits of radical action today? How have they modeled practices for responding to a field of accelerated circulation and co-option?