Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

produced under different names every time, its hands-on use of computer
technology, its nomadic sound systems for mounting concerts at any chosen
location. It could be explored in the offshoots of mail art, with the development
of fanzines, the Art Strike and Plagiarist movements, the Luther Blissett
Project, the invention of radio- or telephone-assisted urban drifting. 5 It
could be previewed in community-oriented video art, alternative TV projects,
AIDS activism, and the theories of tactical media. But rather than
engaging in a preemptive archaeology of these developments, I want to go
directly to their most recent period of fruition in the late 1990s, when a
rekindled sense of social antagonism once again pushed aesthetic producers,
along with many other social groups, into an overtly political confrontation
with norms and authorities.
This time, the full range of media available for appropriation could
be hooked into a world-spanning distribution machine: the Internet. The
speciWc practices of computer hacking and the general model they proposed
of amateur intervention into complex systems gave conWdence to a generation
that had not personally experienced the defeats and dead ends of the
1960s. Building on this constructive possibility, an ambition arose to map
out the repressive and coercive order of the transnational corporations and
institutions. It would be matched by attempts to disrupt that order through
the construction of subversive situations on a global scale. Collective aesthetic
practices, proliferating in social networks outside the institutional
spheres of art, were one of the major vectors for this double desire to grasp
and transform the new world map. A radically democratic desire that could
be summed up in a seemingly impossible phrase: do-it-yourself geopolitics.
J18, OR THE FINANCIAL CENTER NEAREST YOU
Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics 275
Does anyone know how it was really done? 6 The essence of cooperatively
catalyzed events is to defy single narratives. But it can be said that on June
18, 1999 (J18), around noon, somewhere from Wve to ten thousand people
Xooded out of the tube lines at Liverpool station, right in the middle of the
City of London (Figure 10.1). Most found themselves holding a carnival
mask, in the colors black, green, red, or gold—the colors of anarchy, ecology,
and communism, plus high Wnance, specially for the occasion. Amid
the chaos of echoing voices and pounding drums, it might even have been
possible to read the texts on the back:
Those in authority fear the mask for their power partly resides in identifying, stamping and
cataloguing: in knowing who you are. But a Carnival needs masks, thousands of masks. . . .
Masking up releases our commonality, enables us to act together. . . . During the last years
the power of money has presented a new mask over its criminal face. Disregarding borders,