Ars Electronica 2002: UNPLUGGED. Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts

What began—in the simultaneity of glasnost and the WWW, the Soviet Union’s collapse and the buildup of worldwide communication structures—as the utopia of the global village has been transformed into a bleak reality of unleashed capital in which cultural pluralism, if it has any role at all to play, then merely as a sort of ethno-business. Globalization, now installed via the digital acceleration of financial transactions as the dominating principle of the world’s sociopolitical fabric, is—in stark contrast to the myriad potentialities of the technologies it utilizes—not a practice based on openness and integration but rather on exclusiveness and exclusion.

The choice of topic for Ars Electronica 2002 is indicative of how the issue of the political element in art has returned with a vengeance to the agenda of intellectual discourse and artistic practice—a development that did not just begin to manifest itself as a reflex to 9/11 but was already emerging in conjunction with the protest movement in Seattle, Genoa and Porto Alegre, and is moving forward essentially on energy and input supplied by the computerkids generation. The issue of art as the scene of global conflicts is a question of the viral power of art and its capability of coming up with alternative conceptual models, strategies and approaches. The concept of art as antithesis, as corrective and counterpoint to society, is also inseparably linked to the concept of radicalism and resistance, a concept that contemporary art has accompanied in many ways and endowed with identity, and, since the attack on the WTC, one that is being aggressively called into question and subjected to re-evaluation.

In 2002, the Ars Electronica Festival turns its attention to the conception of self of a young generation of media artists and their consciousness of the problems confronting them, and analyzes their positions on the sociopolitical, cultural and sociological implications of the technologies they work with. A variety of formats—symposia, performances and exhibitions—will provide contexts to explore how the current global potential for social conflict is resonating in works of media culture and media art, and to consider aesthetic answers and exemplary projects of artistic practice that, in many instances, employ the same technologies as the economic power aggregates of globalization.

Perspectives obtained by looking out beyond one’s own horizon are meant to intersect and interact with points of view held by “the others,” and thereby make this festival for art, technology and society itself a setting for the complex dynamics of a global reorientation.



1 comment(s)
Re: Ars Electronica 2002: UNPLUGGED. Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts (Laurent Straskraba / 2002/6/5 11:04:00)