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Tandem
Surfing the 3rd Wave
Part One: Critical Arts Ensemble and Tactical Media Production
Interview
by Ryan Griffis
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This interview,
with Critical Art Ensemble, is the first part of a series of investigations
into collaborative/group artistic practice taking place in, and
critical of, the e-conomy.
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of five artists established
in 1987, produces cultural products ranging from books to Web
projects to performances that investigate moments in art, technology,
activism, and critical theory.
MR: How did CAE come to be a working group?
Critical Art Ensemble: It’s too bad CAE has no heroic formation
story like the one the Situationists are often mythologized as
having. CAE’s story is much more mundane. We were students
looking to develop a network that would have a cultural impact—some
way of organizing that would give us enough financial, hardware
and labor resources that we could begin to construct a platform
for a public voice. Collective activity seemed (and still seems)
to be the best option.
MR: Many people, including artists, don’t
understand how most individual artists finance their work, much
less large-scale public work projects and ephemeral / "conceptual"
works. With the work that your group (among others) is involved
in, being politically involved and controversial in a way that
doesn’t always lead to ticket sales, as well as being potentially
expensive (time- and resource-wise), could you talk some about
the economic strategies of CAE as a collaborative venture?
CAE: We don’t understand how to finance work either. No granting
agency has ever given CAE money. We raise funds in three ways.
First, we all have straight jobs. Second, we do a lot of visiting
artist and speaking gigs in conjunction with writing, so we get
royalties, writer’s fees, and speaking fees. This money goes
exclusively toward projects. Finally, we try to throw as many
expenses as possible at any institution that wants to sponsor
a project. We just hobble along from project to project, usually
working with an extremely limited budget. A lot of our imaginative
power goes into figuring out how to make things for minimal cost.
However, it’s better than it was when we first started. At
least we don’t have to liberate materials anymore.
MR: CAE has written quite a bit of theory
for the practice of collaborative art activity, and from a perspective
of involvement. At the current time, where does the group see
itself and other art/activist groups in relation to other practices?
For example, the (very youth-oriented) electronically aided organizing
efforts of recent demonstrations in Philly, L.A., and D.C.?
CAE: It all depends on what the group is geared toward doing.
Over the past five years, CAE has focused primarily on biotechnology
and the colonization bonanza that it is launching. We are working
in a very straightforward manner and trying to do events that
demonstrate, through participatory theater, just what is at stake.
Other groups, like the Institute for Applied Autonomy (www.appliedautonomy.com),
are focused on ground developments, with projects like Graffiti
Writer (a remote-controlled, programmable graffiti-writing robot)
or their GPS project, designed to offer protesters escape routes
so that they pass by the minimum amount of surveillance hardware
when on the run. There is so much to be done. Happily, there is
no single metanarrative that describes intercollective associations,
or that maps the intersection between groups working on direct
material levels and those working in cultural representation.
MR: I’ve read statements from a member
of RTMark expressing uncertainty about the labeling of their activity
as art, or rather how the label can be a double-edged sword. I
have also heard Guillermo Gomez-Pena say (of his and Sifuentes’
work) that they can get away with much more than straight activists
because they’re artists. How does CAE deal with the reception
issue, and are there times when the "Art" label is useful,
and others when it’s not?
CAE: If CAE has to pick a label, we prefer "tactical media
practitioners." However, in keeping with this tendency, we
use labels in a tactical manner. If the situation is easier to
negotiate using the label "artist," then we will use
it; if it’s better to use "activist" or "theorist"
or "cultural worker," then we will use those labels.
Regardless of the label, our activities stay the same. Labels
are useful only in so far as they set expectations among those
with whom we wish to have a dialogue. The label that best taps
the knowledge resources of the audience is the one we try to choose.
A lot of this problem has to do with the social constructions
of the roles of artist and activist. For the most part, these
roles are placed within a specialized division of labor, where
one role, segment, or territory is clearly separated from the
other. We view ourselves as hybrids in terms of role. To CAE,
the categories of artist and activist are not fixed, but liquid,
and can be mixed into a variety of becomings. To construct these
categories as static is a great drawback because it prevents those
who use them from being able to transform themselves to meet particularized
needs.
MR: In looking at many art strategies that
have taken an "oppositional" stance towards the various
forms of hegemonic oppression, be it blatantly political or theoretical,
they usually seem to become assimilated into the larger art world.
Overtly political artists become just that (Haacke) and more theoretical
work becomes academic style (Kosuth, Art-Language). But such criticism
seems to suggest that to become mainstream is death, so opposition
is forever doomed to stay marginal. But it would also seem that
our society (and probably most others) are resistant to drastic
change, without catastrophe, and such assimilation is a necessity—one
that must be carefully watched, but a necessity nonetheless. What
are CAE’s thoughts on such issues? And how does this play
out specifically through CAE’s interventions into a discourse
like biotech?
CAE: Whether to take a position at the center or on the margins
really depends on the goals that have been set by the individual
or group. The reasons for doing projects on the margins are obvious.
Work in such areas is great for education and organizing. From
a collective history viewpoint, many individuals and groups working
on a specific issue can bring about some positive changes. Working
at the center is trickier, because, as you stated, it can always
be used by the center for its own ends. The same can be said when
the margins are organized well enough to have a public voice.
Take the example of ACT-UP. This group collectively changed the
protocols at the NIH in regard to HIV. At the same time, it was
used as an example of democratic action that can impact bureaucracy,
an example of people having free speech, etc. In many ways the
movement was used to reinforce the public perception that democracy
exists in capitalist economy. Someone like Hans Haacke is used
in this same manner on a cultural level. However, the ability
of the sight machine to reconfigure resistant actions (particularly
once they address the center) is not a reason to criticize. If
a group is creating resistant initiatives as a public practice
(as opposed to an underground or otherwise hidden practice) then
the cycle of resistance and assimilation is just a given. The
important thing to watch is how well a group negotiates this give
and take, and not whether or not it does it perfectly.
In the realm of biotech, CAE is just trying to make a specialized
discourse a public (non-specialist) one. CAE is worried that non-specialists
in general may not understand the significance of the biological
revolution. So many elements are hidden and there is so much misinformation
(generally from market directives and science fiction) that it
is difficult just to create a reasonable discussion. Specialization
is a scary thing under these conditions. Unlike with the communications
revolution, few people (directly) use the applications and information
from the biorevolution, although almost all are indirectly touched
by it. Since the public has almost no direct experience with biotech,
it seems abstract and too difficult for a non-specialist to understand.
CAE’s intervention in this situation is to give people direct
experience and reliable information so that individuals can come
to understand that biotech is within their power to think about
and actively affect.
MR: Speaking of the genetic engineering and
biotechnology developments that CAE has investigated, there seems
to be a lot of overlap with concerns coming out of communication
technologies, that other groups, like RTMark and The Redundant
Tech. Initiative, are taking on. Many aspects of CAE’s activities
appear to address this as well in different ways. Could you address
some of these overlapping issues occurring between biological
and communications technologies?
CAE: There are two primary narratives in regard to this issue.
The first is the digital, and the second is control. Recent developments
in information and communication technologies (ICT) and in biotechnology
are on a parallel course. Contemporary ICT is slightly ahead of
biotech, but they are both products of the digital era. When speaking
of the "digital," CAE means this in a grander sense
than just as a category of technology. We are speaking of a worldview,
of a new cosmology. When we use the term "digital,"
we are referring to the idea of replication. Western cosmology
has traditionally been analogic. That is, a process which moves
from chaos to order and back to chaos, and products which exist
in a binary pattern—the original and the counterfeit. For
centuries, the principle that order came from chaos and chaos
from order was unchallenged. This situation really started to
change in the early 20th century with Fordist mass-manufacturing.
Ford intuitively understood the digital in terms of manufacture,
in that he knew the distinction between the original and the counterfeit
was actually an impediment to profit, and that profitability was
increased by employing principles of replication and equivalence.
This new model was directly understood and addressed in the development
of digital technology—the technology of replication and equivalence.
The model is based on the principle that order comes from order.
Such an idea had tremendous impact on biology because without
it, the reproductive process could not be understood, since biological
reproductive process is about replication. Once this idea was
accepted, it was possible to understand DNA in a whole new way.
Manufacturing, ICT and biotechnology (the primary markers of the
20th Century) are linked in that they share this new principle
of order from order.
The second narrative, control, also links ICT and biotech. Both
of these revolutions are about greater determinacy in complex
systems. ICT primarily functions as a means to improve the gathering,
storing, exchange and distribution of information in the virtual
world. Biotech is about the same processes in the realm of the
organic. Through improved control of complex systems, capital
can achieve its own ends in terms of constructing bigger and more
efficient profit machines and maintaining the social hierarchies
that best lubricate this machine. Take the example of work. ICT
has contributed to its intensification to such an extent that
the worker’s body (particularly the technocrat’s) is
failing to function in the high velocity marketplaces of capital
(since the body is a low-velocity constellation). Biotech is partially
an initiative to prop the body up, to redesign it, so it can keep
up with the demands of a society of speed.
MR: With respect to GE/GM technology and
human medicine, what are the group’s interests in visualizing
aspects of this technology that have a significant impact on access
to healthcare and other privileges relating to the understanding
of "healthy" vs. "unhealthy"? For example,
denied access to managed health care, or jobs, based on "genetic
predispositions."
CAE: The group hasn’t really addressed this issue specifically,
although it does come up in relation to our investigations into
the reconfiguration of eugenics in pancapitalist economy. The
question for CAE is perhaps broader, and concerns categories such
as fit/unfit or normal/abnormal. These categories clearly stretch
beyond the specialization of healthcare and into generalized social
and political organization. As tactical media artists, the group
has completed four major projects examining various aspects of
biotech revolution in a theatrical form that invites public participation
(participatory theater). These works raise questions concerning
(1) eugenic traces in assisted reproductive technology ("Flesh
Machine"—both the book (published by Autonomedia) and
the performance project); (2) extreme medical intervention in
reproduction and the attack on sexuality ("Society for Reproductive
Anachronisms"); (3) the acquisition of "fit" flesh
materials ("Intelligent Sperm On-line"); and (4) the
utopian promissory rhetoric spinning off of the Human Genome Project
("Cult of the New Eve"). The most recent project is
one that CAE began to investigate in the "Cult of the New
Eve," and that is the politics of transgenics. What the collective
is exploring in particular is the relationship between transgenic
production and biological environmental resource management.
MR: Could you talk a little about this project
and specifically explain the significance of the concepts of transgenic
production and biological environmental resource management?
CAE: Transgenic engineering is the formation of new combinations
of genes by isolating one or more genes from one or more organisms
and introducing them into another organism. It was once believed
that species boundaries were, for the most part, impenetrable.
Now, all bets are off. Any species or combination of species can
be combined with any other (although the limits of these recombinations
are still unknown).
Once the genomes of all the species are mapped and sequenced,
and this information becomes readable, highly functional organisms
can be created to suit the needs of the institutions or states
that create them (hence the huge investments from both public
and private sectors in various genome projects). Biological environmental
resource management is mainly concerned with introducing species
particular to one ecosystem into another ecosystem, in an intentional
attempt to preserve or to reclaim a desired version of ecological
equilibrium. The problems with this method are clear from the
beginning. How is equilibrium defined? What is a desirable ecosystem?
The ideological repercussions are overwhelming. Be that as it
may, the method has been used for over one hundred years.
There have been successes and disasters, although the disasters
tend to get more press—kudzu, cane toads, etc. With transgenics,
the possibilities for new species introduction grow exponentially.
Resource managers are no longer limited to the catalogue of life
as it existed in the past, but can create a nearly infinite amount
of recombinations (eventually with very specialized characteristics)
from this catalogue. New organisms are already being made on a
daily basis using transgenic processes. The question of what can
be made and what happens when these creatures are released is
of central importance to all specializations concerned with the
environment.
Indeed, the commodities market is already testing the possibilities
by releasing transgenic bacteria, farm animals, and plants into
the ecosystem. This form of testing and of biological environmental
resource management is a relatively gray area. The possibilities
are both utopic and dystopic, but public mistrust of transgenics
makes public discourse on the subject all the more difficult.
To complicate this situation further, capital is in the midst
of an ideologically schizophrenic moment. On the one hand, the
ideology of transgenics (the mixing of categories) has traditionally
been used as a means to mark the other and justify colonization.
Colonial subjects have been considered dangerous because of the
high value placed on transformation and mixing of natural constellations,
which, to the western colonial mind, shows them to be out of harmony
with the law of nature (according to which species can only combine
with like species). To be sure, such activity in western mythology
results in making of monsters in the most extreme sense—vampires,
werewolves, and witches. Not to mention that the territory of
the other, like hell itself, has historically been sprinkled with
projected fantasies of horrific recombinant creatures (harpies,
sea monsters, cyclops, etc.) that are abhorrent to nature. Yet,
now that this law of nature (like with like; species with species)
has been reduced to a simple boundary to be crossed for profit,
capital has to produce a kind of double think that maintains colonial
signifiers but allows the recombinant to be accepted in everyday
life. Now that this new organic realm is open for invasion, centuries
of ideological signage have to be re-engineered. The sharply divided
opinions about transgenic food are indicative of the problem.
On one hand, the traditional transgenics fears sweep through the
general public, and on the other hand, those concerned with maximizing
profit in food resources are building data that show that transgenic
food is neither a health hazard nor an ecological threat. This
battle between the dystopian/utopian form of representing these
new initiatives is the perfect dramatic friction for a theater
of transgenics, and biological environmental resource management
is one key discipline where material conditions will play themselves
out in the extreme.
MR: One thing that I’ve noticed frequently
in CAE’s writings is the examination of our (U.S. mainstream)
culture’s focus on the spectacular and unusual when it comes
to death and memorialization. The group seems to like using Greg
Ulmer’s concept of a memorial for automobile deaths as an
opposing point of focus. This seems to me to suggest an attempt
to do something not often done in "activist" art practices
(Adbusters, etc.), which is mainly addressing latent desire(s)
behind the mundane acts of living, along with being critical of
the actions themselves.
CAE: Nonrational economy, or the under-economy, has always been
of primary concern for CAE, considering that capitalism has an
immense stake in limiting the scope of desire to work and commodity
relations. The task of trying to productively agitate the nonrational
is by far the most difficult because it is where organizational
and analytic abilities are of modest use in insuring successful
actions. The standard tendency of cultural and political activist
practices to react and counter a given activity that reinforces
or expands dominant social hierarchies with a strategic or a tactical
initiative (logos opposed by antilogos) will not work in the realm
of the nonrational. All we can ask in such a case is what we can
do to create conduits into territories of visibility where repressed/invisible
desires can find public expression. When done successfully, such
expressions can introduce a productive level of chaos into society
(usually at a micro level), which, in turn, offers organized (rational)
movements or activities a more liquid space to act effectively.
In other words, the political chess match between oppositional
forces does not have to follow standard patterns of interaction.
While this narrative sounds good in theory, the problem is that
there is no way to know who will benefit or what the final result
of agitating the nonrational may be. It’s a real roll of
the dice that can have as disastrous (authoritarian) consequences
as it can have good (liberationist). However, given the current
situation, resistant forces have little to lose by working in
this arena.
MR: Does CAE see the "us/them"
dichotomy common to many oppostional camps problematic? If so,
what theories/practices do you use to not fall into that trap,
while remaining actively critical?
CAE: That really depends on the situation. For example, CAE is
in favor of what we term "tactical essentialism." When
this is employed, people can successfully use universal binaries
to establish the social solidarity that can, in turn, produce
a resistant movement. It has been used well in the past by the
Women’s Liberation Movement or the Black Power Movement.
However, this choice is tactical, meaning that it must be surrendered
once the movement has been established. If resistant vectors are
to continue to increase in mass and velocity, they must then establish
more complex critiques and actions that recognize the inconsistencies,
aporia, and gray areas involved in separation.
CAE’s main principle for not falling into the binary trap
is our use of tacticality. Obviously, this is a very long discussion
that goes beyond the limits of this interview, but here is the
short version. The five principles of tactical media are: specificity
(deriving content and choosing media based on the specific needs
of a given audience within their everyday life context); nomadicality
(a willingness to address any situation and to move to any site);
amateurism (a willingness to try anything or, negatively put,
to resist specialization); deterritorialization (an occupation
of space that is predicated upon its surrender, or anti-monumentalism);
and counterinduction (a recognition that all knowledge systems
have limits and internal contradictions, and that all knowledge
systems can have explanatory power in the right context, and that
contradiction in general is productive). Our practice is about
process only—the process of resistance. We have no final
cause in mind, no utopias, and no solid social categories. CAE
interacts with the becomings of lived time in an effort to expand
difference.
MR: I don’t want to naturalize technology
here, but what does CAE make of certain trends in technology that
seem to favor more democratic (less specialized) forms of communication
and commerce (shareware, Linux) as opposed to the more dominant
forms of private property and intellectual property rights? How
is biotech connected to these changes?
CAE: We have to be careful with this issue. The primary conflict,
if not crisis, that is happening within capitalist economy concerns
how digital economic power should be configured and consolidated.
Currently, capital is split. On one hand, there are those who
believe that profits can be maximized by doing away with older
notions of property. From this perspective, in an economy based
on replication, the only thing that matters in terms of profit
generation is the speed of replication. The faster information
is replicated and thereby consumed, the higher the profits in
analogue economy. For example, if a company gives away free music
on Napster, that company will in turn sell more CDs, more concert
tickets, more band merchandise, etc. From CAE’s perspective,
this is the position that will eventually become dominant because
it is a digital strategy. On the other hand, many still believe
that digital products should be governed under the same property
principles as analogue products (traditional privatization). The
struggle within capital is intense on this issue. Whichever way
it goes, the public is not going to win. Capital will only tighten
its hold on digital economy. The good side is that during these
conflicts it’s possible for actual anti-capital initiatives
to accomplish more by camouflaging themselves with this discourse
and reaping benefit from the confusion emerging from the crisis.
It’s so nice when the capitalists turn on one another over
a principle that was beyond question prior to digital economy.
Biotechnology is a part of digital economy in that it is primarily
about speed and replication, so we are witnessing the same struggle.
From the research point of view, scientists are generally good
about sharing information, but there are limits. Patenting is
still alive and well. From the corporate perspective, it’s
the same split as with digital information. Some want to treat
genetic and molecular breakthroughs as analogic, others don’t.
Take GM food for example. Some argue that it is best to give away
genetically modified seeds (a common occurrence in postcolonial
food initiatives in the third world).
The belief is that once food production is cornered from the molecular
level up, that profits from other related goods and services will
increase. Others want payment from the beginning. Since much of
this happens on a case-by-case basis (for example, Monsanto uses
both strategies), it’s difficult to tell what the future
will bring. 7
Critical Art Ensemble can be found on the Web at www.critical-art.net.
Ryan Griffis is a member of artofficial construction media
(www.artofficial-online.com) |
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