Prima parte
Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di... more Prima parte Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati
Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica è la raccolta di una serie di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postu- mano. Originalmente l’idea era di realizzare un unico numero dedicato al tema, ma la quantità di lavori di rilievo ci ha convinto a dedicarvi due numeri, dei quali si presenta il primo. Questi lavori hanno reso evidente quanto si dimostri pressante in questo momento ri ettere e declinare gli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumano alle diverse aree della pratica artistica. L’accelerazione espo- nenziale nello sviluppo tecnologico durante l’ultimo secolo ha portato a porsi delle domande sui cambiamenti nei rapporti tra uomo e tecnologia, e, quasi allo stesso tempo, sul vivente nel suo complesso. Da una parte queste domande sono state motivate dalla comprensione che l’intreccio costante con le nuove tecnologie stava generando nuovi e più complessi tipi identitari; dall’altro, che la teoretica predominanza umana su altre forme di vita non era più né sostenibile né tanto meno accettabile. Molte delle ricerche al riguardo venivano proposte sotto il nome di postuma- no: una “condizione” che implica un avanzamento dell’interesse verso una visione della contemporaneità più complessa, che mette sullo stesso piano tutte le forme di vita prendendo in considerazione anche i rapporti con l’inorganico.
The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self. A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures, 2021
This essay focuses on the problem of the face/mask in Anonymous' hacktivist resistances, attempti... more This essay focuses on the problem of the face/mask in Anonymous' hacktivist resistances, attempting to progress the comprehension of digital media dissent within a broader framework that deals with the intensive category of affect. Following in particular the developments proposed by Félix Guattari for the study of psychogenesis, I investigate the processes of facialisation within Anonymous, stressing the relationships with contemporary power formations and the related issue of the production of subjectivity within digital cultures. I argue that the polyvalence of the Anonymous facial machine endeavours to challenge the intensive addressing of individual and collective subjectivations towards ontological homogeneity; and it does by playing on the same plane of facial production, offering a refraining point that stimulates always-novel subversive media actions and practices..
Critical posthumanism offers the tools to overcome the epistemological limits of humanism. These ... more Critical posthumanism offers the tools to overcome the epistemological limits of humanism. These are the limits of an epistemology of domination over otherness, particularly non-human alterities that, from the humanist standpoint, end up occupying an ancillary position with regard to the human-animal. As such, aesthetics needs to be rethought beyond these limits, rebutting an idea that matches with a transcendental notion of beauty, conceiving it as an ideal form. Rather, the viewpoint of critical posthumanism permits an alignment with a notion of aesthetics that pertains a field of relationality and perception. By drawing from these two axes, this article proposes a map of a posthuman aesthetics that aims to signal the ways in which matter becomes an intimate and active part of creative processes: a monstrous muse that, from a platonic inspiration for the human soul, becomes the carnal copula of an embodied mind. The ecological relation between human and non-human otherness is one of reciprocal contamination and co-determination: a relation in which art represents a faithful and heretical ostentation, a vibrant stratification. Moving from a mere creative and mono-directional process to a field of cosmological relationality and perceptive processuality, a posthuman aesthetics is, then, the becoming of such a plural contamination, allowing different forms of individuation and processes of subjectivation.
Data leaks have become one of the most ubiquitous weapons in the arsenal of digital media dissent... more Data leaks have become one of the most ubiquitous weapons in the arsenal of digital media dissent. However, often such processes of mediation exceed a rational understanding of the information revealed. Acting in the domain of the accident, the mediations of leaks operate in the dimension of the event: an immanent and particular set of relations that is provoked by the encounter and collision of various forces, virtually becoming their productive potential. This article advances the question of how data leaks―as a form of media dissent―operate beyond representation, touching upon the vital realm of affect. Intensively enabling a transformation in the state of the forces at play, affect generates possibilities within the emergent world that is constantly in creation. In this article, I argue that the politics of leaks in contemporary network ecologies works in such an affective register, possessing the capabilities to trigger and activate subjects differentially. Exploring the 2012 leak by Anonymous Italia, consisting of around 3,500 Italian police documents, mostly concerning the NoTav movement, I propose that the mediations of data leaks need to be studied and apprehended via their inductive capacities, as a question of affective politics, or alter-politics.
The concept of " anthropomediality " traces a new path for the anthropological study of media, mo... more The concept of " anthropomediality " traces a new path for the anthropological study of media, moving toward the posthuman. Matter here is central, signaling incarnated relations between humans and technologies. This article proposes a theoretical and programmatic delineation of a relational tool: an ecological approach that focuses on materiality in the form of an analysis of strata by means of an excavating movement.
Following the presentation of a paper at the XV MAGIS — Gorizia International Spring School 2017,... more Following the presentation of a paper at the XV MAGIS — Gorizia International Spring School 2017, this article focuses on some of the theoretical premises that the legacy of postmodern thought offers for the understanding of contemporary forms of media resistance. In particular, it centres the attention on so-called 'digital swarms' that, also known as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), are one of the leading 'weapons' in the politics of digital media and network dissent. However, in the literature on hacktivism, these 'swarming machines' are predominantly defined via an analogy with direct action, implying assumptions based on humanist epistemologies, which limits their politics as a matter of representation. With the objective of offering a possibility to move beyond the limits of such a metaphorical impasse, genealogy is suggested as a critical approach to link, through ideas of nonlinearity and difference, postmodern thinking and media archaeological investigations.
This article attempts to rethink a notion of resistance for contemporary forms of dissent and opp... more This article attempts to rethink a notion of resistance for contemporary forms of dissent and opposition that are increasingly organised through digital media and networks. Applying a post-human compass on hacking, a processual reading of the hack is implied to propose a movement towards the idea of hacktions. Hacktions are networked media actions that involve an aesthetic register of de-subjective creativity, aiming towards systematic disruptions: the active resistances of a media ecological dysfunctionality.
In contemporary internetworked societies, digital media and networks have increasingly become a "... more In contemporary internetworked societies, digital media and networks have increasingly become a " battlefield " where, following the emergence of novel power relations, new forms of resistance have come to the fore. Amongst these resistances, there are the so-called " digital swarms ". This is a communicational disruption also technically known in computing as " Distributed Denial-of-Service " (DDoS): a form of political dissent that, in the last years, has hit the headlines, thanks to the digital media actions of Anonymous. This article focuses on these forms of mediation, approaching digital swarms via a historical analysis that stresses nonlinearity and materiality. I argue that digital swarming actions cannot be read as an issue of obtaining attention through media visibility, and that the disruptions these lead to cannot be accounted as mere metaphors of street political action, finding conversely their cultural history in other forms of media disruptiveness. This historical excavation points, then, towards a different genealogy for digital swarms, acknowledging the key material dimensions at stake via the infrastructural character of disruptive mediations as well as via non-anthropomorphic patterns of enunciation.
During the Arab Spring, media actions directed to the technological support of local struggles we... more During the Arab Spring, media actions directed to the technological support of local struggles were implemented. These forms of media hacking can be excavated by archaeological and ecological readings of mediation. In particular, imaginary media and Guattarian machinism allow to linking these to a non linear past beyond computing, activating desiring forces and their peculiar micro-politics through ontogenetic lineages.
To delineate the emergence of hacktivism as a space for collective resistance, into which micro p... more To delineate the emergence of hacktivism as a space for collective resistance, into which micro political actions through networked media combine, I suggest a possible low theorising, hiring Gabriel Tarde's vitalism to deploy it against the grain of invasive control societies and their constant capitalisation of every small produced difference. As a hacker able to force the protected barrier of access to social theory, the micro-sociology of Tarde can be reemployed to resist its own institutionalisation, its becoming high theory. However, the sub-representative and affective streams of his neo-monadology, I suggest, need to be read considering the "post-mediatic" appropriation of media practices and their recombination as hacktions, by activating Guattarian "a-signifying semiological dimensions" to ecologically -orcosmologically, reconstitute politics and society.
Hacktivism emerged with the mass diffusion of digital networks as a concept able to encapsulate a... more Hacktivism emerged with the mass diffusion of digital networks as a concept able to encapsulate and map forms of social and political opposition articulated through the internet. Despite the recurrent criminalisation of this set of phenomena as cyberterrorism or cybercrime, hacktivism seems to readvocate the internet as a place for political action, understanding and contrasting the novel forms of power rearticulated through digital networks. Within an historical phase characterised by mass commodification of the web, the growth of capitalisation of immaterial share, and of forms of mass surveillance and preemptive control, the practices of resistance through networked media have radicalised. These reaffirmed the internet not just as a simple communicative sphere, where political activities can be organised and coordinated, but also as a space in which political dissent can be materially deployed, affecting informative flows, and articulate resistant subjectivities. The concept is recovered and suggested as an in-between space of mediation, a heterogeneous and resistant 'ecology' into which creative approaches to digital media and networks -originated in the computing subculture -and grassroots practices of political participation and cooperation can merge, enriching and overlapping each other towards unforeseen and always emergent forms of opposition.
Lo sviluppo della società dell'informazione ha aperto importanti spazi per la crescita di una cul... more Lo sviluppo della società dell'informazione ha aperto importanti spazi per la crescita di una cultura e di un informazione parzialmente svincolati dalla logica economica che li ha visti per lungo tempo esclusivamente come "merci". La reciprocità e l'orizzontalità che sono alla base dell'etica hacker hanno aperto nuove prospettive per l'informazione stessa, portando alla realizzazione di fenomeni di controinformazione globale come WikiLeaks. Oltre che un'opportunità per una maggiore trasparenza informativa, questi nuovi fenomeni sociali sembrano anche mettere in crisi alle fondamenta, per la prima volta nella storia, i governi e le più importanti industrie dell'informazione del pianeta. La tesi si propone l'obiettivo di ricercare storicamente e socialmente le origini dell'informazione alternativa, valutandone l'attuale evoluzione nella società delle reti, tramite un'analisi empirica del fenomeno globale WikiLeaks.
Prima parte
Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di... more Prima parte Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati
Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica è la raccolta di una serie di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postu- mano. Originalmente l’idea era di realizzare un unico numero dedicato al tema, ma la quantità di lavori di rilievo ci ha convinto a dedicarvi due numeri, dei quali si presenta il primo. Questi lavori hanno reso evidente quanto si dimostri pressante in questo momento ri ettere e declinare gli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumano alle diverse aree della pratica artistica. L’accelerazione espo- nenziale nello sviluppo tecnologico durante l’ultimo secolo ha portato a porsi delle domande sui cambiamenti nei rapporti tra uomo e tecnologia, e, quasi allo stesso tempo, sul vivente nel suo complesso. Da una parte queste domande sono state motivate dalla comprensione che l’intreccio costante con le nuove tecnologie stava generando nuovi e più complessi tipi identitari; dall’altro, che la teoretica predominanza umana su altre forme di vita non era più né sostenibile né tanto meno accettabile. Molte delle ricerche al riguardo venivano proposte sotto il nome di postuma- no: una “condizione” che implica un avanzamento dell’interesse verso una visione della contemporaneità più complessa, che mette sullo stesso piano tutte le forme di vita prendendo in considerazione anche i rapporti con l’inorganico.
The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self. A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures, 2021
This essay focuses on the problem of the face/mask in Anonymous' hacktivist resistances, attempti... more This essay focuses on the problem of the face/mask in Anonymous' hacktivist resistances, attempting to progress the comprehension of digital media dissent within a broader framework that deals with the intensive category of affect. Following in particular the developments proposed by Félix Guattari for the study of psychogenesis, I investigate the processes of facialisation within Anonymous, stressing the relationships with contemporary power formations and the related issue of the production of subjectivity within digital cultures. I argue that the polyvalence of the Anonymous facial machine endeavours to challenge the intensive addressing of individual and collective subjectivations towards ontological homogeneity; and it does by playing on the same plane of facial production, offering a refraining point that stimulates always-novel subversive media actions and practices..
Critical posthumanism offers the tools to overcome the epistemological limits of humanism. These ... more Critical posthumanism offers the tools to overcome the epistemological limits of humanism. These are the limits of an epistemology of domination over otherness, particularly non-human alterities that, from the humanist standpoint, end up occupying an ancillary position with regard to the human-animal. As such, aesthetics needs to be rethought beyond these limits, rebutting an idea that matches with a transcendental notion of beauty, conceiving it as an ideal form. Rather, the viewpoint of critical posthumanism permits an alignment with a notion of aesthetics that pertains a field of relationality and perception. By drawing from these two axes, this article proposes a map of a posthuman aesthetics that aims to signal the ways in which matter becomes an intimate and active part of creative processes: a monstrous muse that, from a platonic inspiration for the human soul, becomes the carnal copula of an embodied mind. The ecological relation between human and non-human otherness is one of reciprocal contamination and co-determination: a relation in which art represents a faithful and heretical ostentation, a vibrant stratification. Moving from a mere creative and mono-directional process to a field of cosmological relationality and perceptive processuality, a posthuman aesthetics is, then, the becoming of such a plural contamination, allowing different forms of individuation and processes of subjectivation.
Data leaks have become one of the most ubiquitous weapons in the arsenal of digital media dissent... more Data leaks have become one of the most ubiquitous weapons in the arsenal of digital media dissent. However, often such processes of mediation exceed a rational understanding of the information revealed. Acting in the domain of the accident, the mediations of leaks operate in the dimension of the event: an immanent and particular set of relations that is provoked by the encounter and collision of various forces, virtually becoming their productive potential. This article advances the question of how data leaks―as a form of media dissent―operate beyond representation, touching upon the vital realm of affect. Intensively enabling a transformation in the state of the forces at play, affect generates possibilities within the emergent world that is constantly in creation. In this article, I argue that the politics of leaks in contemporary network ecologies works in such an affective register, possessing the capabilities to trigger and activate subjects differentially. Exploring the 2012 leak by Anonymous Italia, consisting of around 3,500 Italian police documents, mostly concerning the NoTav movement, I propose that the mediations of data leaks need to be studied and apprehended via their inductive capacities, as a question of affective politics, or alter-politics.
The concept of " anthropomediality " traces a new path for the anthropological study of media, mo... more The concept of " anthropomediality " traces a new path for the anthropological study of media, moving toward the posthuman. Matter here is central, signaling incarnated relations between humans and technologies. This article proposes a theoretical and programmatic delineation of a relational tool: an ecological approach that focuses on materiality in the form of an analysis of strata by means of an excavating movement.
Following the presentation of a paper at the XV MAGIS — Gorizia International Spring School 2017,... more Following the presentation of a paper at the XV MAGIS — Gorizia International Spring School 2017, this article focuses on some of the theoretical premises that the legacy of postmodern thought offers for the understanding of contemporary forms of media resistance. In particular, it centres the attention on so-called 'digital swarms' that, also known as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), are one of the leading 'weapons' in the politics of digital media and network dissent. However, in the literature on hacktivism, these 'swarming machines' are predominantly defined via an analogy with direct action, implying assumptions based on humanist epistemologies, which limits their politics as a matter of representation. With the objective of offering a possibility to move beyond the limits of such a metaphorical impasse, genealogy is suggested as a critical approach to link, through ideas of nonlinearity and difference, postmodern thinking and media archaeological investigations.
This article attempts to rethink a notion of resistance for contemporary forms of dissent and opp... more This article attempts to rethink a notion of resistance for contemporary forms of dissent and opposition that are increasingly organised through digital media and networks. Applying a post-human compass on hacking, a processual reading of the hack is implied to propose a movement towards the idea of hacktions. Hacktions are networked media actions that involve an aesthetic register of de-subjective creativity, aiming towards systematic disruptions: the active resistances of a media ecological dysfunctionality.
In contemporary internetworked societies, digital media and networks have increasingly become a "... more In contemporary internetworked societies, digital media and networks have increasingly become a " battlefield " where, following the emergence of novel power relations, new forms of resistance have come to the fore. Amongst these resistances, there are the so-called " digital swarms ". This is a communicational disruption also technically known in computing as " Distributed Denial-of-Service " (DDoS): a form of political dissent that, in the last years, has hit the headlines, thanks to the digital media actions of Anonymous. This article focuses on these forms of mediation, approaching digital swarms via a historical analysis that stresses nonlinearity and materiality. I argue that digital swarming actions cannot be read as an issue of obtaining attention through media visibility, and that the disruptions these lead to cannot be accounted as mere metaphors of street political action, finding conversely their cultural history in other forms of media disruptiveness. This historical excavation points, then, towards a different genealogy for digital swarms, acknowledging the key material dimensions at stake via the infrastructural character of disruptive mediations as well as via non-anthropomorphic patterns of enunciation.
During the Arab Spring, media actions directed to the technological support of local struggles we... more During the Arab Spring, media actions directed to the technological support of local struggles were implemented. These forms of media hacking can be excavated by archaeological and ecological readings of mediation. In particular, imaginary media and Guattarian machinism allow to linking these to a non linear past beyond computing, activating desiring forces and their peculiar micro-politics through ontogenetic lineages.
To delineate the emergence of hacktivism as a space for collective resistance, into which micro p... more To delineate the emergence of hacktivism as a space for collective resistance, into which micro political actions through networked media combine, I suggest a possible low theorising, hiring Gabriel Tarde's vitalism to deploy it against the grain of invasive control societies and their constant capitalisation of every small produced difference. As a hacker able to force the protected barrier of access to social theory, the micro-sociology of Tarde can be reemployed to resist its own institutionalisation, its becoming high theory. However, the sub-representative and affective streams of his neo-monadology, I suggest, need to be read considering the "post-mediatic" appropriation of media practices and their recombination as hacktions, by activating Guattarian "a-signifying semiological dimensions" to ecologically -orcosmologically, reconstitute politics and society.
Hacktivism emerged with the mass diffusion of digital networks as a concept able to encapsulate a... more Hacktivism emerged with the mass diffusion of digital networks as a concept able to encapsulate and map forms of social and political opposition articulated through the internet. Despite the recurrent criminalisation of this set of phenomena as cyberterrorism or cybercrime, hacktivism seems to readvocate the internet as a place for political action, understanding and contrasting the novel forms of power rearticulated through digital networks. Within an historical phase characterised by mass commodification of the web, the growth of capitalisation of immaterial share, and of forms of mass surveillance and preemptive control, the practices of resistance through networked media have radicalised. These reaffirmed the internet not just as a simple communicative sphere, where political activities can be organised and coordinated, but also as a space in which political dissent can be materially deployed, affecting informative flows, and articulate resistant subjectivities. The concept is recovered and suggested as an in-between space of mediation, a heterogeneous and resistant 'ecology' into which creative approaches to digital media and networks -originated in the computing subculture -and grassroots practices of political participation and cooperation can merge, enriching and overlapping each other towards unforeseen and always emergent forms of opposition.
Lo sviluppo della società dell'informazione ha aperto importanti spazi per la crescita di una cul... more Lo sviluppo della società dell'informazione ha aperto importanti spazi per la crescita di una cultura e di un informazione parzialmente svincolati dalla logica economica che li ha visti per lungo tempo esclusivamente come "merci". La reciprocità e l'orizzontalità che sono alla base dell'etica hacker hanno aperto nuove prospettive per l'informazione stessa, portando alla realizzazione di fenomeni di controinformazione globale come WikiLeaks. Oltre che un'opportunità per una maggiore trasparenza informativa, questi nuovi fenomeni sociali sembrano anche mettere in crisi alle fondamenta, per la prima volta nella storia, i governi e le più importanti industrie dell'informazione del pianeta. La tesi si propone l'obiettivo di ricercare storicamente e socialmente le origini dell'informazione alternativa, valutandone l'attuale evoluzione nella società delle reti, tramite un'analisi empirica del fenomeno globale WikiLeaks.
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Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati
Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica
è la raccolta di una serie di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postu- mano. Originalmente l’idea era di realizzare un unico numero dedicato al tema, ma la quantità di lavori di rilievo ci ha convinto a dedicarvi due numeri, dei quali si presenta il primo.
Questi lavori hanno reso evidente quanto si dimostri pressante in questo momento ri ettere e declinare gli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumano alle diverse aree della pratica artistica. L’accelerazione espo- nenziale nello sviluppo tecnologico durante l’ultimo secolo ha portato a porsi delle domande sui cambiamenti nei rapporti tra uomo e tecnologia, e, quasi allo stesso tempo, sul vivente nel suo complesso. Da una parte queste domande sono state motivate dalla comprensione che l’intreccio costante con le nuove tecnologie stava generando nuovi e più complessi tipi identitari; dall’altro, che la teoretica predominanza umana su altre forme di vita non era più né sostenibile né tanto meno accettabile. Molte delle ricerche al riguardo venivano proposte sotto il nome di postuma- no: una “condizione” che implica un avanzamento dell’interesse verso una visione della contemporaneità più complessa, che mette sullo stesso piano tutte le forme di vita prendendo in considerazione anche i rapporti con l’inorganico.
Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati
Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica
è la raccolta di una serie di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postu- mano. Originalmente l’idea era di realizzare un unico numero dedicato al tema, ma la quantità di lavori di rilievo ci ha convinto a dedicarvi due numeri, dei quali si presenta il primo.
Questi lavori hanno reso evidente quanto si dimostri pressante in questo momento ri ettere e declinare gli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumano alle diverse aree della pratica artistica. L’accelerazione espo- nenziale nello sviluppo tecnologico durante l’ultimo secolo ha portato a porsi delle domande sui cambiamenti nei rapporti tra uomo e tecnologia, e, quasi allo stesso tempo, sul vivente nel suo complesso. Da una parte queste domande sono state motivate dalla comprensione che l’intreccio costante con le nuove tecnologie stava generando nuovi e più complessi tipi identitari; dall’altro, che la teoretica predominanza umana su altre forme di vita non era più né sostenibile né tanto meno accettabile. Molte delle ricerche al riguardo venivano proposte sotto il nome di postuma- no: una “condizione” che implica un avanzamento dell’interesse verso una visione della contemporaneità più complessa, che mette sullo stesso piano tutte le forme di vita prendendo in considerazione anche i rapporti con l’inorganico.