Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 20, Issue 1
January 2014
Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism
Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti, Susanne Jaschko and Julian Stallabrass
Editor: Bill Balaskas
This issue investigates the relevance of socialist utopianism to the current dispositions of New Media Art, through the contributions of renowned and emerging academic researchers, critical theorists, curators and artists.
From the early stages of its development, New Media Art readily adopted a variety of means of artistic engagement and expression that aim at serving modes of utopian social being: from multi-modal collaboration to unrestricted public participation and from open software applications to hacktivism, the germs of leftist political thought seem to abound in the art of the Digital Age. Prompted by the economic crisis, New Media Art appears to increasingly employ the tools provided by new technologies in order to penetrate all aspects of global social living and assert the need for socioeconomic change. New Media artworks and art projects have gradually formed a common practice whose objectives allude to utopian theories of social organization lying closer to certain visions of communism, direct democracy and anarchism, rather than to the realities of neoliberal capitalism within which new media are produced and predominantly operate.
Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism explores this multifaceted context in an attempt to demystify whether and to what extent the art of the Digital Age could be the result of the seemingly paradox combination of capitalism’s products and communism’s visions.
Contents
Introduction
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Commonist Red Art: Blood, Bones, Utopia and Kittens
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Changing the Game: Towards an ‘Internet of Praxis’
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Suggestions for Art That Could Be Called Red
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Why Digital Art Is Red
Articles
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Grounds for the Political Aesthetics of Cultural Commons in the Post-Medium Condition: The Open Source Cultural Object
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Powered by Google: Widening Access and Tightening Corporate Control
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Hackteria: An Example of Neomodern Activism
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Communism of Capital and Cannibalism of the Common: Notes on the Art of Over-identification
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Material Conditions of Production and Hidden Romantic Discourses in New Media Artistic and Creative Practices
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Gamsutl
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From Tactical Media to the Neo-pragmatists of the Web
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Dissent and Utopia: Rethinking Art and Technology in Latin America
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The Thing Hamburg: A Temporary Democratization of the Local Art Field
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Artists ad the New Producers of the Common (?)
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Long Story Short
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The Desires of the Crowd: Scenario for a Future Social System
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From Literal to Metaphorical Utopia: Interconnections Between the Inner Structure of the New Media Art and the Utopian Thought
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The Point Source: Blindness, Speech and Public Space
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Invisible Histories, the Grieving Work of Communism, and the Body as Disruption: A Talk about Art and Politics
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Taken Square: On the Hybrid Infrastructures of the #15M Movement
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When Aesthetics Is Not Just a Pretty Picture: Paolo Cirio’s Social Actions
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“In eigener Sache” (Speaking for Ourselves): Magazines, GDR, October 1989 – June 1990
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Artwork / Dreamwork in New Media Documentary