- How far do exhibitions under the label of ‘hacking’, ‘piracy’ or ‘open
source’ open up a framework for critical art work?
- Is it possible to place tactical media, which are hybrid
agencies per se, into the art field without reducing their transformative
potential
Knowbotic Research, in its recent projects, enters the unstable zone of legal and security conditions of networks and demands new tactics and agencies inside the domain of the public .
Such
new ways of public acting cannot fall into the trap of the worn dichotomy
of private and public but rather open new possibilities of public agency
for domains of the commons
and include tactics which were seen as inappropriate for the contextualization
of the public domain in the modern sense. Instead of referring only to
the concepts of transparency, visibility and manifestation, we suggest
to upgrade the public agencies with non-representational activities like
encrypting, rendering invisible, disinforming, hiding, fleeting, tunnelling,
disturbing, spoofing, and other camouflage tactics.
What we are looking for is a potential for the production of a different type of network politics, where a fluid capacity to connect and disconnect through heterogeneous coded enactions is used productively as a kind of degree zero (where power comes from), which it is important to return and relate to.
Such
capacity in fact is in itself not so much neutral as not immediately given.
Tactical and coded connectivity allows for difficult or easy communication,
for long term commitments, encrypted and fleeting affairs, it is crossed
by conflicts, gives no guarantees of success and possesses a weird kind
of memory, collective, fleeting and yet durable. It demands a sustained
effort to redefine, design, act out the domains of the commons.
