Nomadmedia: On Critical Art Ensemble

Author(s): Rebecca Schneider

Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 120-131
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1146866
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 Nomadmedia

On Critical Art Ensemble

Rebecca Schneider

When an audience member enters the performance space for Critical Art
Ensemble's Flesh Machine, she might think she's stumbled upon a lecture in
some Biology Hall of her past, except for the fact that the information is ex-
tremely up-to-date and delivered by artists. Dressed in lab coats, CAE presents
information on medical and scientific practices in the field of eugenics, pep-
pered by short performance sketches so that the "class" will stay attentive.
Unlike a parodic or distantiated performance of a lecture (recall Ron Vawter
performing Clifton Fadiman's explication of Our Town in the Wooster
Group's Routes 1 and 9), CAE's opening is a lecture without overt irony. They
are lecturing (which is not to say they are not performing).' Wanting their au-
diences to know some facts about contemporary eugenics, CAE finds the lec-
ture to be both the gentlest and most reliable entry into what quickly becomes
a more complexly challenging event.
Opening with a lecture, emphasis is placed on the particular situation that
many women face in regard to the political, social, and economic pressures to
reproduce and raise children. In fact, for CAE biological reproduction is pri-
marily an "Ideological State Apparatus" (Althusser 1977). From the start, CAE
explains their own political position regarding issues of reproductive technol-
ogy-as one member put it, they don't want to "trick anyone." Frontally and
predictably staged, with all the trappings of an orthodox presentation, not
only is this format a functional means of getting across a body of information,
but the traditional theatre/lecture presentation panders to habit, providing, in
CAE's words, a "cushion for the impact of process theatre" which follows.
In the second part of the event spectators become far more involved-this
is the "lab" portion of biology class. Audience members participate in actual
lab processes and encounter various models of artificial reproduction. This is
CAE's attempt to include a tactile relationship to the material, going beyond
presentational language--what Junior High teachers call "hands on." But this
is no labeling and pasting of leaves onto paper (my own memory of Junior
High bio). For this section, CAE built its own cryolab to house living human
tissue for potential cloning so that audience members become hands-on ge-
netic engineers. But is this any more than a theme park of cryopreservation?
How much "real science" is involved?

The Drama Review 44, 4 (T168), Winter 2000. Copyriqht ? 2000

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I20

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 Nomadmedia 121

1. Flesh Machine, a 30-

minute lecture/performance.
In preparation for Flesh Machine CAE studied in biology labs to learn
Performed from 1997 to
cryopreservation and biopsy techniques. They lived with and documented a
1998 at Beursschouwburg
couple going through in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment. They studied ma-
(Art and Science Collision),
terial science to learn how to build a cryolab. In the fall of 1997 they mounted
Brussels; Kiasma Museum
their performance in Vienna at Public Netbase,' touring participants through
of Contemporary Art,
the "signage" of the reproductive process (from theory to testing to represen-
Helsinki; Public Netbase,
tations of the process). Their aim was to reveal what they considered to be
Museums Quartier,
hidden eugenic agendas, agendas that become most apparent on the intimate
Vienna; Labor Gallery,
level of the literal procedure.3 To do this, they stumbled across that social sac-
Graz; and Kapellica Gal-
ral line between hard science and soft art. When asked about the specifics of
lery, Ljubljana. The project
their study process, CAE gave me the following response:
opens with a stage perfor-
mance to critically
We didn't study "seriously." We are amateurs. However, to get to the
contextualize the event that
political economy of this situation, and the sociological impact of these
follows by problematizing
goings-on, you don't have to get a degree. We simply read lots of books
various elements of new re-
and journals; spent a semester in cell biology lab (more like a participatory
productive technology.
researcher in anthropology); spent two weeks living with a couple going
(Photo courtesy of CAE)
through IVF; did numerous interviews with molecular biologists; had bi-
ologists (experts) check our work, and generally act as consultants. When
we did Flesh Machine in Vienna, a team of biologists from the local uni-
versity came to the event to check our work, and show we were a fraud.
They did not find one thing they could dispute, and were quite congratu-
latory about it too-although they were never too keen on our politics.4

When I asked specifically which labs participated with them in their train-
ing, CAE provided the names of four U.S. labs, but asked that I not make
them public as "it could lead to problems for people who have been kind
enough to help us under the table." I asked CAE these questions when TDR

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122 Rebecca Schneider

editor Richard Schechner was critical of the appellation "study" to describe

CAE's forays into hard science. Schechner was "fearful of amateur dabbling
being labeled 'study."' He reminded me that "Study comes hard, is not cheap,
and doesn't yield to 'I told you I did it"' (Schechner 2000). Did CAE learn
biopsy, or watch it and then mimic it? I shared this concern with CAE, and
was given the following response-a response that in many ways succinctly
presents CAE's general principles in this and other projects:

This is the very attitude we are struggling against-the crotchety aca-

demic defending his territory. Until myths such as "we must suffer long
and hard to learn about a model" are done away with (which is not to
say that specialization should be done away with) there will never be
interdisciplinarity, nor productive public dialogues on various knowledge
bases. We are amateurs, and say so very proudly. Amateurism is a funda-
mental principle of tactical media work and nomadology in general.
Amateurs move mountains; think of ACT UP for example-total ama-
teurs, yet had an impact on AIDS policy (and I might say, for the most
part, for the better). One of the functions of "you must be an expert"
discourse is to keep such movements from happening-listen to big
brother, he knows best. Not all science is brain surgery (although they
are the exalted scientists who are so much smarter than everyone else, so
it must be). Most lab techniques, particularly the ones we learned, are
monotonous and simple, and any idiot can do them. Contrary to expec-
tation, the Human Genome Center is not a scientific think tank with
brilliant biologists scurrying about in X-File surroundings, rather it is just
a bunch of students from the general work-study pool following Betty
Crocker cake recipes. In Flesh Machine particularly, this was a myth that
we were trying to break down. It's one reason why we had on-site labs,
so the audience could see that science isn't magic, and that they the audi-
ence are easily smart enough to participate in this discussion if they so
desire (and without suffering).

The second section of Flesh Machine starts when the lectures end and the au-
dience begins to mill about and attend to computers throughout the space,
available for audience members to check out a CAE CD-Rom. The CD con-
tains a donor-screening test (abducted by CAE from an "actual clinic"). Audi-
ence members sit at monitors and take the test to assess their individual
suitability to be further reproduced through donor DNA, cytoplasm, and/or
surrogacy. If they "pass" the test, they receive a certificate of genetic merit.
Those who pass can be further examined through an interview with CAE fol-
lowed by actually having a cell sample taken by lab technicians at the site. These
samples are then stored, if the audience member is willing, in CAE's cryotanks.
The artists have been collecting photographs of audience members who "pass"
this standardized test, and they claim that the similarities among those deter-
mined fit for reproduction is astounding. By now they can predict "passes" just
by looking at them: straight-looking white white-collars, usually male.
After this hands-on cell-sharing experience, the audience re-assembles as a
group for the close of the performance. This final section of Flesh Machine is
intended to underscore the class politics, economics, and logic of human
commodification implicated in eugenics.
At this point, CAE presents a frozen embryo to their audience-an embryo
that CAE inherited from a couple who no longer needed their eggs. A live
image of the embryo is projected through a video beam onto a screen. The
image has a clock marking the time the embryo has until it is "evicted" from
its clinical cryotank. If enough money is raised to pay the rent [approximately

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 Nomadmedia 123

$60] on the cryotank through the performance, the embryo will live. If not, it
will be "terminated."
Put another way, if no one buys the embryo, it dies.
CAE then takes donations from the audience. To date every performance
has ended with the death-by-melting of the embryo. This part of the perfor-
mance, CAE claims, speaks for itself-though on more than one occasion
CAE has had to speak in the wake of their actions. In Vienna, for instance,
they found themselves on national TV debating the ethical implications of
"embryo murder" with the Archbishop of Salzburg live via satellite.
The group of artists who call themselves Critical Art Ensemble are con-
cerned with "tacticality" in an information age when power is radically dislo-
cated from geography by the instant-time synapses of cyberspace and when
colonizing "penetration" seeks out new frontiers at the level of DNA. Their
most recent concerns have pivoted on what they label the "New Eugenic Con-
sciousness," but this interest in biotechnology grows out of their longer-stand-
ing agenda regarding postnational capitalism. CAE has repeatedly asserted that
digital technology has enabled capital power to "retreat" into cyberspace
"where it can nomadically wander the globe, always absent to counterforces,
always present whenever and wherever opportunity knocks" (CAE 1995). 2. How& 3. Project visitors at
to fight nomadic power CAE-style? With dislocation and intermediality-per- Flesh Machine's Vienna
haps nomadmediality-an ever-shifting, no longer simply hybridized, media manifestation use the
tacticality.s If nomadic capital is never present, never there, never available to CD-Rom to take
BioCom
embodied resistance-how can it be challenged? How does one counter or re-
donor-screening tests and to
sist absence? With absence. By becoming nomadic. By appearing disappeared.
gather information on repro-
Nameless. Or, dissimulating, by appearing as not that which one claims to ductive
be or technology. On the
by claiming to be not that which one seems. For example, CAE set up aCD, faux
viewers can find fac-
corporation called BioCom and cast it onto the web.6 Art? Or capital? tual data on in vitro fertili-
CAE is a collective of five white "new media" artists, two women and three
zation (IVF) treatment,
men, trained in various skills from book arts and performance to computer, new methods for assisted re-
film, video, photography, and critical theory. CAE's work has consistentlyproduction,
been egg and sperm
committed to the "continuation of resistant cultural models." While exploring
donor profiles, and even
and critiquing models of representation used in capitalist political economy
taketo
an actual donor-screen-
sustain what they call "authoritarian policies" they have experimenteding
with
test. There is a also a
various organizational (versus primarily representational) strategies for making
family page documenting a
art that intersects with activist practices. Because they resist precise or discreet
couple going through IVF
location relative to genre and venue and artist identity, their work questionsand thea children's book on as-
politics of location, specifically the politics that have historically located art viareproduction. Those
sisted
authorship, site, public/private space, media, price, frame. who pass the donor screen-
Publishing and performing collectively and anonymously, CAE disseminates ing test are asked to give
its works as broadly as possible (CAE books, if not the authors' names,blood
havefor DNA extraction
circulated freely on the web). Their anonymity serves as a mark of their and
resis-
amplification. (Photos
courtesy of CAE)

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I24 Rebecca Schneider

tance to privatization-as does their collectivity. They are not secretive about
their names. They simply do not use their names as signatures relative to their
work. Similarly, they do not respect the signatures of other artists as "Keep
Out" signs of private property. Indeed, between 1988 and 1994, CAE began
releasing object-oriented artists' books of plagiarized poetry. The books, five
in all, sold to library, university, and museum collections around the U.S.7
While plagiarism draws lines of indebtedness to the historical avantgarde
(one thinks of Brecht immediately), in other ways CAE is reminiscent of
feminist collectives in the 1970s who refused to put forward a director or an
author because of the critique of authority at the base of their efforts to think
and create differently. And like such collectives, CAE has firsthand experience
that collective activity runs against the grain of what the art world expects. Fi-
nancial support favors individuals, as do art institutions. Several years ago CAE
gave up applying for grants. As they wrote in 1998:

In spite of all the critical fulminations about death of originality, the art-
ist, and the rest of the entities named on the tombstones in the modernist
cemetery, these notions persist, protected by an entrenched cultural bu-
reaucracy geared to resist rapid change. (1998:73)

In art schools across the country, students are taught to accept the ideological
imperative that artistic practice is an individual practice-there is "no place
where one can prepare for a collective practice" (74). Even in theatre schools
the emphasis is rarely on ensemble. Though theatre is a model that carries
within it a deep imperative for ensemble work, more often than not that
work is subsumed under the name of a director, an auteur, or a specific site. A
roving band of anonymous actors without a playwright or director or stage is
hardly the kind of collective one finds promoted in academies or on the pro-
fessional stage, and so students entering the profession with training, have
most often already been trained against the grain of collectivity.'
CAE began in 1986, two years after the Guerrilla Girls formed their anony-
mous activist collective of "artists and professionals." Comparing the two
groups can help to situate CAE's anonymity as similarly activist, but differ-
ently focused. The Guerrilla Girl mission is to expose racism, sexism, and ho-
mophobia in the art world and they have done this through posters, statistical
fact sheets, masked actions, and various publications. While the Guerrilla Girls
were anonymous initially to protect their names, the necessity of their ano-
nymity itself made a loud statement about the general blindspotting of artists
of color, female artists, and queer artists precisely where art meets capital-the
"art scene" of galleries, funding, museums, reviews, shows, sales, and place-
ment in history. Historically, women and people of color have not been
named "artists" and for such artists, then, anonymity signals a troubled and sus-
pect position. The broader sexed, raced, and gendered context that continues
to influence capital in the art establishment is what the Guerrilla Girl collec-
tive wants to name and locate (see Guerrilla Girls 1998).
Looked at from this perspective it would be possible to argue that for a col-
lective of white people (such as CAE) to claim anonymity and emulate the
fluid dislocation of capital while appropriating the work of others is nothing
remarkably out of the ordinary historically, but rather a longstanding privilege
of the larger propertied white collective. Most likely, however, CAE would
agree and argue that they deploy such emulation in an attempt to make those
operations explicit. Rather than struggle to name the unnamed, CAE names
the operation of naming, struggling to expose the fact that the named artist
(the "star" individual) has long been circulated as a name to support a broader
anonymous (unmarked) collective of (white patriarchal) privilege that repro-

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 Nomadmedia I25

duces its foundations by structurally facilitating institutional support for the

cult of the individual artist.

Critical Art Ensemble began when two grad students at Florida State Uni-
versity collaborated on low-tech videos. In initially 1987, picking up new
members, the group transformed into an artist/activist collective. Some of
CAE's early projects between 1987 and 1993 include Fiesta Critica-a project
launched in I991 in Indiantown, Florida. CAE interacted with Mayan mi-
grant workers in the town and developed a set of pieces presented at an Easter
fiesta, using their grant money to support the fiesta, which otherwise would
have been beyond the means of the workers. In Cultural Vaccines (1989), CAE
collaborated with Gran Fury on a multimedia event that critiqued U.S. policy
regarding the HIV crisis.' The first chapter of ACT UP in Florida emerged
from this exhibition, with CAE members as founding members. Exit Culture
(1992) was a series of works developed for highway culture in Florida. The
piece incorporated trucker poetry for CB, postcards for tourists, invisible per-
formance, and bus-stop video. For three days, CAE traveled around Florida in
a Winnebago stopping only to perform at tourist sites, rest stops, and malls.
In 1994 CAE published The Electronic Disturbance with the Autonomedia Col-
lective of Semiotext(e). The book was a broad-based critique of technology
within pancapitalism. It immediately found a very wide audience. Hakim Bey
called the book a "manifesto for a new generation of artists" and Tim
Druckerey heralded it "required reading." The book jumped to the #I best-
seller slot in nonfiction on the Village Voice alternative best-seller list. It was
available to download free off the web. Suddenly CAE was deluged with offers
to speak, perform, and publish. The Electronic Disturbance was translated into Ger-
man within a month of its appearance in English (works by CAE now appear in
eight languages).'" Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1996)
soon followed and CAE was on the road all over Europe, the U.S., and Canada.
In 1995 at a festival in Winnipeg, a woman showed a CAE member a
photo of her child. While this quotidian exchange might not have been re-
markable, this particular photo showed the child at the four-cell stage. The
woman was a single parent who had conceived through in vitro fertilization.
The sighting provoked a turn in CAE's work from critiquing information and
communications technology, with an emphasis on the internet, to addressing
ideological problems associated with biotechnology.
This turn, which resulted in Flesh Machine, is interesting in part because
CAE's critique of electronic technology had always included a critique of the
ways in which net culture ignores or blindspots material and bodily effects in
favor of a thrall to supposed user disembodiment. And yet, one of the most
riveting suggestions in Electronic Civil Disobedience concerns the futility of con-
temporary political activism based solely on present-body embodied actions.
While pressing for an assessment of the bodily effects of web culture, CAE si-
multaneously believes, quite adamantly, that resistance at the level of bodies in
the street is defunct. The CAE argument runs as follows. Activism of the
present protesting body (from sit-ins to marches to million-body appearances)
is dependent on an image of sedentary power: that is, power as centered in
bunker-institutions, locatable and inhabitable, available for physical take-over.
But power in pancapitalism has become nomadic, decentered (or at least
multicentered), and global-dis-located into the synapses of digitalia. In fact,
CAE argues that the state has given people the streets (as a kind of "false public"
space) because power has itself gone nomadic through electronic networks.
To take to the streets, today, they argue, is civil obedience-anticipated, sanc-
tioned spectacle-prolonging the illusion that presence alone can have effect."''
While presence certainly does have a kind of effect, it is largely representa-
tional and pedagogical-not what CAE would call direct political action.

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I26 Rebecca Schneider

CAE makes its primary concern one of tacticality regarding digital interrup-
tions into pancapitalism's digital fluidity. Literalizing a certain poststructural
insight, CAE maintains that direct political action in the form of civil disobe-
dience cannot be effected through affects of presence in representational re-
gimes. The days are over, they remind us, when "castles, palaces, government
bureaucracies, corporate home offices, and other architectural structures stood
looming in city centers, daring malcontents and underground forces to chal-
lenge their fortifications" (in Dery 1998). As Mark Dery explicates CAE's po-
sition, the edifices that once housed power are now "monuments to its
absence." Power is neither visible nor stable-thus effective resistance must
make use of the invisible and unstable. CAE makes it clear that working in
representational regimes is key to pedagogical resistance-and such resistance
is important. But CAE makes a distinction between pedagogy and direct po-
litical action. For them, direct political action today necessitates invisibility
and non-locatability, but pedagogical actions can slide into the space between
location and dislocation, visibility and invisibility. Flesh Machine is largely a
work falling into the category of pedagogy and thus should not be mistaken
for direct political action, or for civil disobedience.
If power is neither visible nor stable, and if effective resistance must make
use of the invisible and unstable, what kinds of instability does CAE deploy?
For CAE, a long-standing device of instability is recombinance. In the essay in
this issue of TDR, CAE cites the "tradition of digital cultural resistance" as
one indebted to a wide-ranging heritage of recombinance stemming not only
from digital media but more generally from the "avantgarde": "combines,
sampling, pangender performance, bricolage, detournment, readymades, ap-
propriation, plagiarism, theatre of everyday life, and so on." The disobedience
that the digital offers is precisely a renewed deployment of the age-old disobe-
dience of the thieving copy, a plagiaristic unsettling of the prerogatives of the
ruse of locatable origin.
The benefits some theorists of the virtual see in the "new" body-the
degendered body, for example-is, according to CAE, shortsighted. To them,
the promise that cyberspace might become a truly multisensual apparatus, un-
leashing myriad bodily pleasures released from policings of desire, ignores the
fact that the technology is developed and released only under the auspices of
intensive capital. "Why would capital want to deliver what would essentially
be a wish machine to its population?" asks CAE:

Capital depends upon a consistent state of what the Situationists called

"enriched privation." If satisfaction were ever offered to the public, the
economy of desire would collapse overnight. A virtual wish machine is
about as likely as capital legitimizing and insisting upon the use of heroin
among its [working- and middle-class] population. (in Dee 1998)

CAE's citation of Situationist Debord above is a huge clue to CAE's in-

debtedness to '6os radical performance politics-and an indication that it does
not agree with the postmodern claim that the avantgarde is dead. The Electronic
Disturbance relentlessly critiques conventional Western theatre and perfor-
mance art-seeing much of it invested in a navel-gazing celebration of the
"solipsistic self' and citing the proscenium arch as the primary apparatus of
that solipsism in a machinery of presence. But certain avantgarde art tactics are
considered resistant-and useful for pedagogical actions.'" The Living Theatre,
4. Flesh Machine. DNA Happenings, and other '6os attempts to collapse the distinction between art
is amplified at an onsite and life are cited as offering "tremendous help" by "establishing the first re-
lab. (Photo courtesy of combinant stages." CAE also cites Berlin Dada, Boal's Theatre of the Op-
CAE) pressed, feminist performance of the '70s, and Guerrilla Art Action Group as

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 Nomadmedia 127

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128 Rebecca Schneider

inspirational. Though, as they claim in this issue of TDR, the art world regu
larly "defanged" these movements, the lesson CAE takes from various earlier
radical theatres is the impact of the "experiential," of something called "rea
life." They maintain the importance of an art that is "looped back" into the
immediacy of everyday life. Into and out of. The loop is important as they
feel equally strongly that "everyday life" can not be art's exclusive terrain:

CAE's interest in the Living Theatre stems from our belief that it offered a
proto-postmodern model of cultural production. The group quite con-
sciously located itself in the liminal position between the real and the
simulated. Various behaviors were appropriated and redeployed so per-
fectly that, regardless of their ontological status, they had the material im-
pact of the real. The Living Theatre performed the crisis of the real before
it had been adequately theorized, and contributed to the conceptual foun-
dation now used to understand and create virtual theatre. It helped make
it clear that for virtual theatre to have any contestational value, it must loop
back to the materiality of everyday life. (in Dery 1998; emphasis added)

The turn to biotechnology from their earlier artwork on communications

technology offered a site for a direct interrogation of the relations between digi-
tal capital culture and the "loop" to material everyday life. CAE wanted their
work on biotechnology to challenge the distinction between the simulated and
the real-something that biotechnology itself challenges (think simply of Dolly
the sheep clone [see Schneider forthcoming]). In the tradition of the Living
Theatre, they wanted to tap the contestational value in enunciating "the loop."
Intent on the real/virtual/real loop, then, CAE's deployment of digital
models of recombinance is not a move to bankrupt the material body as site of
political action, despite the fact that the "street" has moved to the
nonmateriality of the information highway. Rather recombinant resistance
needs to be attentive, precisely, to the body politics of nomadic authoritarian
power and its multiple deployments of the digital toward increased
privatization-including the production of "false public space" and the paral-
lel production of privation for "undesirable" or deviant bodies. Despite its no-
madism and dislocation in terms of the national or geographic, capital still
operates through metaphors of the frontier, which are, more precisely, meta-
phors of penetration (the name of a new consortium of scientists and compa-
nies investing in cloning is "Probio America"). For CAE the biological body,
or more precisely, the privatization, manipulation, and commodification of
the organic, is the "new frontier" that capital is "penetrating."
While feminist and critical race theorists on the left have long been hip to
the regulation of bodies under capital and the politics of the body as capital
vis-a-vis production and reproduction, the "new eugenic consciousness" of
the right makes the laboring body seem like an antiquated machine. CAE sug-
gests, however, that we distrust this notion that the laboring body and its ma-
nipulation will be outmoded through the promises of biological technology
New Eugenics is a body radically disembodied-a body contained in a single
sample, the body as digitized code-but still, perhaps, a future body designed
relative to economics, regulating and managing a white-collar workforce. I
asked one CAE member to make this point clearer to me-being a bit skepti
cal of the conspiracy theory that seemed to undergird the argument. The artist
pointed to a large glass office building opposite my seventh-floor window in
the financial district in Manhattan. We sat silently for a few moments and
watched the workers inside. Floor upon floor upon floor of management--
the ones with windows, the ones we could see, were middle-level execu-
tives-many of whom might be the clients of a corporation like BioCom,

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 Nomadmedia 129

5. CAE member places

prepared cell samples into
the cryotank during Flesh
Machine. (Photo courtesy
of CAE)

many of whom might "pass" for appropriate genetic duplication, and many of
whom might be able to afford the cost. It was hard for me to see exactly how
this was a frontier-body upon body upon body, floor upon floor upon floor,
the furthest thing from "wild" let alone "where no man has gone before."
But maybe it only takes a little thought. Even if this frontier is more cellular
than it is geographic, its ramifications are as far-reaching as other "penetra-
tions" have been in the history of capitalist expansion. Here, biotechnology,
like some railroad to the interior, opens access like never before-making
"the body" available for empire building.
CAE's point in Flesh Machine is clear: The new commodity market open for
colonial expansion of property politics is taking place intra-bodily via repro-
ductive biotechnologies. They advocate, through their nomadmedial highway
dodgings between art, critical theory, digital production, performance, and
the literal life/death auction of an embryo, a close analysis of linked apparati

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13o Rebecca Schneider

of reproduction (aesthetic, digital, and biotechnical). They are not neo-

luddites. They are very much manifesto-style avantgarde artists of technology.
Their biggest effort is pitched toward making certain that technological devel-
opment is shaped, designed, and deployed alternatively.
Even, it seems, if some have to die in the process.

Notes

1. See Jon McKenzie (forthcoming) on the "lecture machine."

2. Subsequent performances took place at the Kapellica Gallery, Ljubljana; the Labor Gal-
lery, Graz; Beursschouwburg, Brussels (at the Art and Science Collision); and at the
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
3. CAE's notion of hidden agendas has a resolutely Marxist ring, though their angle on
late capital's liquid structure-its nomadism-lands them more precisely in league with
the anti-rationalist schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari.
4. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes by CAE are from a series of interviews con-
ducted from June 1999 to June 2000.
5. The word "intermedia" was introduced into the arts lexicon by Dick Higgins in 1965 (see
Higgins 1969, the essay dates from 1965). In describing artworks at the interfaces of estab-
lished media and in the interstices between art and life, Higgins anticipated the
postmodern preference for hybridity over formal unity and the challenge to "art" as an
ontologically pure and priviledged category. Deploying intermedia CAE's nomadmediality
dislocates as well as interfaces.

6. BioCom is now a page on CAE's website at <critical-art.net/biocom>.

7. Each book was a small edition, hand-bound, letter-press book printed in editions of
100oo copies.
8. Of course there are ensembles of performers today who are very active. The Wooster
Group, East Coast Artists, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Spiderwoman, Mabou Mines,
Sacred Naked Nature Girls, Goat Island, Grotowski Workcenter, the Living Theatre,
Great Small Works, and more. In the art world, collectives are much more foreign, for
obvious reasons. In the theatre, groups are not dominant, but neither are they
nonexistant. In fact, one of the tendencies the theatre inherited from the interaction
with visual arts that produced performance art was the tendency toward solo creation.
9. Gran Fury is an artists' collective that emerged simultaneously with CAE and the Guerrilla
Girls. Ironically named after the popular brand of car used by police, Gran Fury was closely
tied to the ranks of New York AIDS activists. Their mission was to use the medium of ad-
vertising to strike back against homo- and AII)S-phobia. Refusing to identify its members,
Gran Fury wheat-pasted posters all over New York City. Perhaps most famous is the up-
turned pink triangle and "Silence=l)eath" logo. Kissing Does,'t Kill (I990), a video by the
collective, aired on cable and MTV. A bus poster of the same title was banned in several
cities because it featured multicultural imagery of gays and lesbians kissing.
I0. After completion of this essay, I asked CAE to tell me which eight languages were rep-
resented. They are, interestingly, difficult to track. By the time CAE got back to me,
the number had jumped to nine. As of June 2000, CAE gave me the following response:

Our books are in German, Italian, French, Slovenian. Our books are an-
thologies of our writings usually combining the most influential chapters
from TED and ECD-TED and ECD proper were only published in Ital-
ian; Fls/Mi Alachiiec proper was only published in German, although an Ital-
ian edition is supposed to appear, and a French edition also if our publisher
gets back in the black. Various configurations of the group's writings are in
Hungarian, Finnish, Spanish, Portugese, and Dutch. The Slovenian is
new-we have gone from 8 to 9 languages. We have signed releases for
Chinese and Korean translations, but we don't have the reference (maybe it
happened; maybe it didn't). Since all our work is anti-copyright, we get
surprised all the time. Our work gets printed and we don't know it, and
often happen to stumble across it.

r I. That embodied protest as effectual might be a ruse of postnational power is reminiscent

of Baudrillard's argument that the manufacture and media deployment of scandal is an

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 Nomadmedia 13 I

empty ritual of authority engineered to maintain the ruse that capital and its governing
body has conscience (1994).
12. CAE makes a distinction between pedagogy and direct political action. Direct political ac-
tion necessitates, today, invisibility and non-locatability, but pedagogical actions can slide
into the space between the visible and the invisible, as between virtuality and "the real."

References
Althusser, Louis
1977 "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." In Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays. London: New Left Books.

Baudrillard, Jean
1994 Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press.

Critical Art Ensemble

1994 The Electronic Disturbance. New York: Autonomnedia/Semiotext(e).

1995 Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas. <www.critical-art.net/
ECD/Ch I.html>.

1996 Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas. New York:
Autonomedia/Semiotext(e).
1998 "Observations on Collective Cultural Action." Artjournial 57, 2 (Suminer):72-85.
Dee

1998 "Critical Art Ensemble." Fringecore 4:7-9.

Dery, Mark
1998 "Vector Block on Telecoms Avenue: Critical Art Ensemble Interviewed."
<www.metamute.com/issue I o/dery.htm>
Guerrilla Girls

1998 The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New
York: Penguin.

Higgins, Dick
1969 "Intermedia." In fiew & omnbwhew. Barton, VT: Something Else Press.
McKenzie, Jon
forthcoming Perfirn or Else: Contract in Negotiation. New York: Routledge.

Schechner, Richard
2000 Personal correspondence with author.
Schneider, Rebecca
forthcoming "Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre." In Psycho-
analysis and Performance, edited by Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear. New
York: Routledge.
1999-2ooo Interviews with author.

Rebecca Schneider is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the

Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at Cornell University. She is the author of
The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997), and is working on a second
book titled Playing Remains. Schneider has published essays in several anthologies
and journals, and is a Contributing Editor to TDR. She is also President of the
Women in Theatre Program of the American Theatre in Higher Education Association.

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