The Electronic Disturbance

by Critical Art Ensemble

Short pieces and essays examining the changing rules of cultural and political resistance: The current technological revolution has created a new geography of power relationsas data, human beings confront an authoritarial impulse that thrives on absence. As a virtual geography of cognizance and action, resistance must assert itself in electronic space.

Genres: Theory, Technology

148 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. For CAE, tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.[1]

Since its formation in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida,[citation needed] CAE has been frequently invited to exhibit and perform projects examining issues surrounding information, communications and bio-technologies by museums and other cultural institutions. These include the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C.; the ICA, London; the MCA, Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the London Museum of Natural History; Kunsthalle Luzern, and dOCUMENTA 13.

The collective has written 7 books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages.

Its work has been covered by art journals, including Artforum, Kunstforum, and The Drama Review. Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of awards, including the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation.

Reviews

[Simón · Rating 5 out of 5]

How could anyone be this prescient in 1994? An astute doomsday look at late capitalism's move to the digital realm. An indictment of technocracy. Before the internet was in people's homes, before blogging, before Facebook, this collective anticipated that the "body without organs" mediated by the screen would democratize access to mass media. But they warned that such access would only be liberating if the means of exchange stayed open through regulation. Predictably, entities like governments didn't regulate Facebook, Google, and Apple. Hence, our bodies without organs are circulating in the form of data only to make them more money. I read this to learn about plagiarism and the Situationists, but ended up being blown away by the extent of intuition regarding the hopelessness of occupation-based radical activism.

[Kola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though some of it was over-the-top, there are a lot of interesting ideas. And it was very advanced for its time.