Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory.
The spheres of the public, as is abundantly clear from the events of the past decade, are caught between the gleaming infosphere, the dot-mania-economic sphere, and the globalized post-political sphere. But between the clean rooms of the infosphere, the speculative economy of virtualized riches, and the potential of electronic repressive tolerance in the political sphere (just think of Echelon or the incorporation of the Life Sciences), is a social sphere in which the socialization of cybernetics comes with significant resistance. To slip into mystification or universalization behind the veil of benevolent globalization, 'neoliberal' capitalism, or systems integration is as much self-deception as it is cowardice. We cannot deceive ourselves with the modest symptoms of satisfaction that come from an uncritical relationship as beta-testers of cultural software systems, nor can we congratulate ourselves for posing alternative operating systems, or appease our responsibilities for being 'outside' the system. As Critical Art Ensemble write it, 'The profit machine is on ...'
If it is the case that the 'takeover' of art has been co-opted by in-house design, engineering, animation, software, or strategies for so-called 'avant-garde' thinking, a number of initiatives, now liberated from the slavish aesthetics of an institutionalized art-world incapable of relinquishing its hierarchies, have aimed not at normalization, but at the disruption of expertise as 'authority.'
The ‘solid-state’ in which the electronic disciplines of biology, neuro-cognition, artificial life and/or intelligence, cyber-democracy, non-located power, electronic economics, rendered authenticity, or pervasive surveillance predominate, cannot be sustained by the reinvention of the simple dialectics, nor by its analysis within academic discourses of sociology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, or, perhaps in art. Instead, the seemingly provisional and fast changing sources of power, masked behind the metaphors of open-systems, ubiquitous technical protocols, mystifications of cyber-democracy, and by a glaring lack of serious theorization, have developed a kind of nomadic and contingent management strategy paradoxically legitimated by its very lack of centrality and by its intransigent allegiance to the principle of technical reason.
CAE’s interventions into the sacrosanct territories of authority represent a provacation directed at both the worn traditions of public sphere cultural politics and a reckoning with the accelerating implications of technologies for a generation inebriated with virtualization, and a slap against the dangerous slip into corporate populism masquerading as artistic practice.
Critical Art Ensemble ist ein Kollektiv von fünf Künstlern, das in seinen Arbeiten die Überschneidungen zwischen Kunst, Technologie, radikaler Politik und kritischer Theorie untersucht.
