DigiActive.org

Gregory Sholette: the Dark Matter of Digital Activism

source: gregorysholette.com

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation/ Distribution and REPOhistory, as well as co-editor of “The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life” (MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006) with Nato Thompson.

He is currently working on a book about the political economy of the art world and his concept of creative “dark matter”, a theory which states that culture is increasingly being produced by ordinary people rather than experts and paid producers.  In this interview we delve into the implications for dark matter for digital activism, which in its own way seeks to create a new political culture through the creation of digital campaigns by grassroots activists.

Mary: In a short essay in the book A Guide to Democracy in America, you write that “ever more accessible technology for manufacturing, documenting, distributing, as well as pilfering images and information” has created a cultural landscape where “one can hardly escape an encounter with this heterogeneous production.”  You posit that, even though its content is most often apolitical (a YouTube video of a “dramatic hamster“, for instance), this production is closer in spirit to that of politically-engaged activists. What makes this massive creative output political?

Greg : Because it is generated for its own sake ––for the sake of expression, opinion, desire, even collective resistance–– such “bottom-up” cultural production embodies a potential form of opposition to the disciplinary mechanisms of the capitalist market. This may sound more than a little romantic, but its not. Generating, retooling, distributing, and recycling images, artwork, information, free software, all of this activity reveals an impulse that is directly opposite the kinds of enclosing and privatizing mechanisms necessary to capitalism from its inception.

Nevertheless, paradoxically perhaps, this social productivity is now of great interest to many who are part of the market. They are keen to brand such phenomenon as a new form of value production, a new source of capital wealth. I think the recent economic collapse suggests that enclosing, controlling, and extracting this alleged value is a much more complicated process than the proponents of the “new” networked creative economy once thought. Resistance to the appropriation of social production by the market (or the state for that matter) might be thought of as the latest manifestation of a ghost that has haunted the world for centuries (if not longer): the specter of happiness and solidarity born out of real freedom from necessity.

This ghostly apparition, or ghostly promise, is visible especially when we look at the intermittent history of resistance to enclosures beginning with the peasant wars of the 1500s before industrialization, then followed by the worker uprisings of 1848; the Paris Commune of 1871; the revolutions and near revolutions of the early 20th Century including to some extent Mexico (1910), Russia (1917), Germany (1918); or more recently the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the revolts of the 1960s (May 1968 in Paris, Prague, New York, and many other urban centers), followed by Operaismo in Italy in the 1970s, and most recently the anti-Apartheid struggles that culminated in the late 1980s, the events linked with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the massive opposition to corporate globalization witnessed in Seattle and London in 1999, followed by Quebec, Prague, Genoa and elsewhere. With this fragmented “history of ghosts” in mind we begin to narrate a political impulse within the “amateur” détournement of military and corporate technologies ––digital, cellular, genetic–– that are going on today.
Mary: You term this work “Dark Matter” because, while it makes up the majority of creative activity, it remains “invisible to institutions and discourses.” In discussing activism we are ever concerned with over-turning power structures. What effect might Dark Matter have on these structures?

Greg: It is already happening. This missing cultural mass, this dark matter productivity is rattling all sorts of existing institutional structures, and not only within the art world, but also within academic, corporate, and political spheres of power. I would say that for artists however, the recently popular term “relational aesthetics” (curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s term for art involving social interactivity) reflects the recognition that no work of art is made in isolation, but instead it always depends upon a great deal of unrecognized (and unremunerated) laborers in which artists (and non-artists) collectively generate and regenerate the very possibility of “the work.” The structural reality of art is that there is always a perpetual oversupply of production: there are, and always have been, too many artists, art students, arts administrators for the system to every fully make use of. If we map this structural asymmetry onto the broader economy, we see that something similar is going on there as well. But all of this has been greatly amplified by thirty years of deregulation and privatization and the arrival of the “risk society” with its entrepreneurial, “winner-takes-all” mentality. For most people today the options are greatly polarized: either pass through the eye of the needle and become a highly rewarded “creative” worker, who flexibly manages her own time and assets, or, join the ranks of the vast surplus and redundant population competing for part-time jobs at, or near the bottom of the economy, including precarious service work with little or no job security or benefits. The rise of what, for lack of a better phrase, could be called self-organized dark matter collectivism only illuminates this redundancy. Sometimes, this illumination is democratically and broadly generous, at other times, as with the far right, this organized dark matter is patriarchal, and filled with racial or class resentment. What has to be encouraged therefore is the first form of dark matter, something that I believe can only happen if a strong, symbolic link is forged between these informal, shadow practices and the promise (real/phantasmal) that the “history of ghosts” outlined represents.

Mary: In the essay you also note that cyberspace is a particularly fertile source of this creative activity. Can you give some examples of your favorite sources for Dark Matter on the internet?

Greg: I am most interested in those informally organized groups who are not only active within cyberspace, but who also make use of the Internet to go beyond mere self-representation. In other words, I favor those group-entities who take the organizational, pedagogical, informational, but not-didactic (playful) potential of digital technologies to heart, and yet who are also typically located in a specific city or place, including:

Candida Television: http://candida.omweb.org/

Journal of Aesthetics and Protest: http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/

6+: http://www.6plus.org/borcila.html

Howling Mob Society http://www.howlingmobsociety.org/

Critical Spatial Practice: http://criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com/

MicroRevolt: http://orangeworks.blogspot.com/

Center for Tactical Magic: http://www.tacticalmagic.org/

Yomango!: http://yomango.net/ and http://www.yomangoteam.com/

The Yes Men: http://theyesmen.org/

Critical Art Ensemble http://www.critical-art.net/

Target Autonopop: http://www.targetautonopop.org/

Temporary Services: http://temporaryservices.org/
> including their wonderful Public Phenomenon Archive

Mary: How can activists – particularly digital activists – apply the theory of Dark Matter to make their work more effective?

Greg: Dark matter is mobilized whenever individuals organize to gain some degree of collective autonomy from the market, just as many of the groups highlighted above have sought to accomplish through their act of informal, self-institutionalization (but also with nationalist and racist organization such as The Minuteman Project, or Storm Front). But what I am calling cultural dark matter is better understood as an ongoing presence/absence that lurks within the very structure of social production (and non-production). By recognizing the fact that most of us are part of this missing, shadow-mass we potentially liberate ourselves from certain expectations including a entire range of symbolic representations of hyper-success generated by the mass media (sometimes drawing on dark matter, such as when graffiti artists are asked to “write” on limited edition, Louis Vuitton sneakers). These images of “making it” are bestowed on a very few individuals, nevertheless we help make that injustice a reality. So rather than ask dark matter to offer a well-defined set of organizing tools it might be better to think of it as calling out to artists and activists to embrace your redundancy!

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Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College. His sculpture and mixed media works have been exhibited at the Taipei Biennial, Periferic 8 biennial in Romania, the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and the Dia Art Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, Apex Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. A founding member of the artist’s collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000), he is the co-editor of two books, Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, (University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, (MASS MoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 05, 08). At present he is working on a book about “dark matter” and the political economy of art for Pluto Press, and has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Third Text with theorist Gene Ray on the theme “Whither Tactical Media.”

Websites:

http://gregorysholette.com

http://darkmatterarchives.net (still under development)