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Ben Grosser, Geert Lovink: Platform Resistance in the Age of Platform Capital
Platform Resistance in the Age of Platform Capital
(p. 251 – 272)

Ben Grosser, Geert Lovink

Platform Resistance in the Age of Platform Capital
A Dialogue

PDF, 22 pages

  • global ecology
  • resistance
  • politics
  • contemporary art
  • rhetoric / elocution
  • artistic practice

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English

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Ben Grosser

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibition venues include the Barbican Centre in London, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, and Galerie Charlot in Paris. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Telegraph, El País, Libération, and Der Spiegel. The Chicago Tribune called him the “unrivaled king of ominous gibberish.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, Critical Code Studies, and Technologies of Vision, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is an associate professor of new media and studio art in the School of Art + Design, co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and an affiliate faculty member with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the School of Information Sciences, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Geert Lovink

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing and the future of art criticism.
Other texts by Geert Lovink for DIAPHANES
Sara Alonso Gómez (ed.), Isabel J. Piniella Grillet (ed.), ...: NO Rhetoric(s)

This volume maps some of the territories where points of resistance can be located and where art’s resistant potential becomes relevant once again. "NO Rhetoric(s): Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art" focuses on a neuralgic issue which was intensely debated during the last three decades, but has rarely become a topic of its own. It offers an updated way which art presents itself as an agent of resistance, whether in a mere rhetorical stance or as an effective critical strategy. In the face of general discourse of revolt and insurrection that is highly fashionable today, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of ‘negation’ still yields an emancipatory potential. Struggling between NO rhetoric and NO to rhetoric, the artistic and the political field permanently interfere with each other; sometimes they merely overlap, while at other moments they strongly insist on demarcating themselves. Nonetheless it remains to be seen more precisely of what their respective critical forces and agonality consist. In this sense, the book contributes to a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and the political, as expressed by Jacques Rancière in his distinction between “the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form.”

 

This volume provides a diverse array of voices and essays from the academic and artistic field that present theoretical approaches as well as study cases. By juxtaposing them, it encompasses both the complexity and diversity of artistic practices within a global instituting framework that seems to capitalize on different political streams. The reader will find contributions on sexual dissidence, ecology and the Anthropocene, geopolitics of the digital age and institutional critique. The authors, artists and scholars from different disciplines share their desire to shed some light on how art approaches these urgent issues.

 

Contributors: Sara Alonso Gómez, Mieke Bal, Zach Blas, Katharina Brandl, Nancy Garín, Kendell Geers, Ben Grosser and Geert Lovink, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Federico Luisetti, Charlotte Matter, Isabel J. Piniella Grillet, Nadia Radwan, Fiona Siegenthaler, David Tenorio, and Jaime Vindel.

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