Dada Data: Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics 9781350227613, 9781350227644, 9781350227620

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
NOTE ON COVER DESIGN – MONTAGE MÄDELS
ILLUSTRATIONS
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction: From Dada Tricks to Post-Truth Politics
Dada
Dada and conceptions of (post-)truth
From Dada tricks to data-driven politics
Dada and the alt-right
The structure of this book
The chapters
PART ONE From Dada to Data
CHAPTER ONE Dadadatadada: From Dada to Data and Back Again
Data poems
Dada data hacks
Big Dada data politics
Mean memes
Dada data tactics
Conclusion
CHAPTER TWO Clouds, Critique & Contradiction: Programming Dissent in Dada and Data Art
Dada: The sound of words; or, mind the gap!
Big data and the Angelus Novus ; or, the end of history, again?
The datalogical turn: Recipes, instructions, procedures; or, tips and tricks for a dynamite(d) data soufflé. (Aka the end. But also the beginning)
CHAPTER THREE The Legacy of the Berlin Dada Media Hoaxes in Contemporary Parafictive Acts
Political context and social turns
Johannes Baader and the Berlin Dada media hoaxes
Contemporary acts
Conclusion
montage mädels Our Collective Practice: A Visual Essay
PART TWO Global Dada
CHAPTER FOUR Sheida Soleimani, Cyborg: Photomontage in an Expanding Network
CHAPTER FIVE Black Dada Data: Collage as a Tool of Resistance against White Supremacy Thinking in the Digital Age
‘Post-truth’ as sign for the unwillingness to abandon white privilege
Collage strategies and political resistance
Black collage
Black Dada
Black Dada Data
Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX Dada’s African South
Dada’s revolt
Dada South?
Complacency and resistance
The Body in performance
From the street to online activism
Post- truth – Dada irrationality in the age of data
Conclusion
CHAPTER SEVEN Paula Rego: A Dada Attitude against Authority in the Post-War Period
Vomiting Salazar
In a black and white city of great inertia
A geography of fear
Conclusion
PART THREE Big Dada Data
CHAPTER EIGHT Big Dada, Big Data: Schwitters’s Merzbau, the Private and the Trash
Thriving on trash
Private grottos
Exposure and the inner life
Networked grottos
Obsessive archival, collective trash: Data and trash
Temporally flat, materially deep
Conclusion
CHAPTER NINE Identity, Ecology and the Arts in the Age of Big Data Mining
Data love
Data mining business
Social engineers without a cause
Cunning of reason
CHAPTER TEN The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution
Is technology anything other than a weapon?
The machine as means to counter the powers of the social
The social as obsolete under the digital
Counter-revolution: The early modern period as antecedent
Kemang Wa Lehulere Dog of Orion
PART FOUR Dada x Alt-Right. Faking the Truth
CHAPTER ELEVEN Down the Rabbit Hole of the Alt-Right Complex: Artists Exploring Far-Right Online Culture
CHAPTER TWELVE Fashwave: The Alt-Right’s Aestheticization of Politics and Violence
Alt-right fascism
Analysing Fashwave’s ‘Retro-Futurism’
Visual analysis 1: ‘Embrace tradition’
Visual analysis 2: The Christchurch mosque shooter and ‘The Great Replacement’
Conclusion: Replicate to accelerate
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Post-Internet Art and the Alt-Right Visual Culture
IOCOSE Dadasourcing
PART FIVE Dada Data Tactics
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Pixel Pirates: Theft as Strategy in the Art of Joan Ross and Soda Jerk
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Precarious Data Aesthetics: An Exploration of Tactics, Tricksters and Idiocy in Data
Dadaist tactics
Digital Dada
Precarious aesthetics in data
CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Multiple Narratives of Post-Truth Politics, Told Through Pictures
Context – a sea of images compete for our attention
Images prioritizing impact over veracity
Images, digital data breach and (in)justice
New era of the collective coherence of the far-right
The response of artists and activists
Diversity, equality and digital (in)justice
Visually led – alternative models of online communities
New models, supported by appropriate funding mechanisms
INDEX

Citation preview

Dada Data

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Dada Data Contemporary Art Practice in the Era of Post-Truth Politics Edited by SARAH HEGENBART AND MARA-JOHANNA K Ö LMEL

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection and editorial material © Sarah Hegenbart and Mara-Johanna Kölmel, 2023 Individual chapters © their authors, 2023 Sarah Hegenbart and Mara-Johanna Kölmel have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: montage mädels and Tjaša Krivec Cover image: montage mädels, ‘mine human ores’, 2021 © montage mädels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-2761-3 978-1-3502-2762-0 978-1-3502-2763-7

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

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CONTENTS

Note on Cover Design vii Illustrations viii Notes on Contributors xiii Acknowledgements xviii

Introduction: From Dada Tricks to Post-Truth Politics Sarah Hegenbart and Mara-Johanna Kölmel 1

PART ONE From Dada to Data 1 2 3

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Dadadatadada: From Dada to Data and Back Again Mara-Johanna Kölmel 23 Clouds, Critique & Contradiction: Programming Dissent in Dada and Data Art Meredith Hoy 41 The Legacy of the Berlin Dada Media Hoaxes in Contemporary Parafictive Acts Rebecca Smith 55

Visual Essay by montage m ä dels PART TWO Global Dada 4 5

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Sheida Soleimani, Cyborg: Photomontage in an Expanding Network Matthew Biro 75 Black Dada Data: Collage as a Tool of Resistance against White Supremacy Thinking in the Digital Age Sarah Hegenbart 105 Dada’s African South Roger van Wyk 125 Paula Rego: A Dada Attitude against Authority in the Post-War Period Leonor de Oliveira 143 v

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Visual Essay by donna Kukama PART THREE Big Dada Data 8 9 10

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Big Dada, Big Data: Schwitters’s Merzbau, the Private and the Trash Natalie P. Koerner 165 Identity, Ecology and the Arts in the Age of Big Data Mining Roberto Simanowski 183 The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution Joshua Simon 197

Visual Essay by Kemang Wa Lehulere

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PART FOUR Dada x Alt-Right. Faking the Truth 11

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Down the Rabbit Hole of the Alt-Right Complex: Artists Exploring Far-Right Online Culture Inke Arns 217 Fashwave: The Alt-Right’s Aestheticization of Politics and Violence Lisa Bogerts and Maik Fielitz 230 Post-Internet Art and the Alt-Right Visual Culture Vid Simoniti 246

Visual Essay by IOCOSE

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PART FIVE Dada Data Tactics 14 15 16

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Pixel Pirates: Theft as Strategy in the Art of Joan Ross and Soda Jerk Jaime Tsai 265 Precarious Data Aesthetics: An Exploration of Tactics, Tricksters and Idiocy in Data Annet Dekker 280 The Multiple Narratives of Post-Truth Politics, Told Through Pictures Jack Southern 292

Index 309

NOTE ON COVER DESIGN – MONTAGE MÄDELS ‘mine human ores’ every time we scroll – when we are at our most tired, our lowest ebb – you and i consume. we are ‘consumers’. we consume a ready-meal discourse. we are also rebuilt, slowly. psychometric components, in 2016 we permanently recalibrated our systems of rule. but we have already forgotten. now we are mainly picked open & drained. you and i are mined. they mine our human ores. ores in the shape of our fears; aspirations; our political dreams for the future. time to choose: swap out phone for megaphone, or keep on scrolling

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Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, 1919. Collage, 114 × 90 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 / Photo: © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders. Casey Reas, All Your Face Are Belong To Us (Followers 1K), 2015. Code, digital images, computer, screen, 1080 × 1920 pixels. © Casey Reas. Sheida Soleimani, Minister of Petroleum (Angola), Secretary of State (United States, 1973–77), 2017. Archival pigment print, 40 × 60 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Tschabalala Self, Pocket Rocket, 2020. Digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on dyed canvas, 244 × 244 × 4 cm / 96 × 96 × 1 1/2 in. © Tschabalala Self. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York. Photo: Matt Grubb. Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (A/A), 2019. Silkscreen ink on canvas, in two panels, overall: 243.8 × 192.7 cm; 96 × 75 7/8 in, each panel: 121.9 × 192.7 cm.; 48 × 75 7/8 in. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler. Buyani Duma and Thato Ramaisa perform as Desire Marea and Fela Gucci as the performance art duo FAKA. Photographed by Viviane Sassen, 2015. © Viviane Sassen. Still image from Swarm Theory V1.0 directed by Kyla Davis and Daniel Buckland at the National Arts Festival, Makhanda, 2019. Copyright: Kyla Davis, Photo Credit: Daylin Paul. Paula Rego, Salazar vomiting the homeland, 1960. Oil on canvas, 94 × 120 cm. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum – Modern Collection, Lisbon, Portugal. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London. Jennifer Chan, Boyfriend, 2014. Video artwork (6:26), video still (at 1:24). © Jennifer Chan. IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Dada means nothing), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

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IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Boom boom), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists. IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Abolition of the future), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists. IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Everything we look at is false), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists. Joan Ross, ‘The naming of things’, The claiming of things, 2012. Digital video, 7:36 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney. Erica Scourti, Difficult to Find the Lost Things, 2019, detail. Printed with permission of the artist. Flatness screengrab Feb 2019, showing artwork by Nikhil Vettukattil. © Shama Khanna, 2021. Image courtesy of flatness.eu, and reproduced with the permission of Shama Khanna.

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Tristan Tzara, DADA soulève tout, 1921. Text by the artist (recto). Letterpress, sheet: 10 13/16 × 8 1/4’ (27.4 × 21 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 3216.2008, © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, Christophe Tzara. Raoul Hausmann, Sound-Rel, 1919. Sound poem, coll. Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, château de Rochechouart. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Grayson Earle, Binary view of the Bail Bloc mining algorithm – a software that mines cryptocurrency which is then traded for US dollars to bail low income people out of US jails, 2021. © Grayson Earle. Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, 1919. Collage, 114 × 90 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 / Photo: © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders. Anonymous, George Soros Meme, 2016. shorturl.at/eistQ, accessed 18 January 2022. Casey Reas, All Your Face Are Belong to Us (Followers 1K), 2015. Code, digital images, computer, screen, 1080 × 1920 pixels. © Casey Reas. Sheida Soleimani, Lachrymatory Agent, 2014. Archival pigment print, 24 × 17 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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Sheida Soleimani, Neda¯, 2014. Archival pigment print, 24 × 17 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, Vitriolic Acid: An Eye for an Eye, 2015. Archival pigment print, 24 × 17 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, Atefeh, 2016. Archival pigment print on cotton, paracord, dimensions variable. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Photograph by Will Amlot. Courtesy Edel Assanti. Sheida Soleimani, Raheleh, 2016. Archival pigment print, 40 × 27 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Hannah Höch, Russische Tänzerin (MeinDouble) [Russian Dancer (My Double)]. Photomontage. 12 × 8 7/8 in. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick, Germany (joint property of Braunschweigischer Vereinigter Klosterund Studienfonds). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. John Heartfield, “Die Nation steht geschlossen hinter mir” (The Nation stands united behind me), from AIZ, Vol. 12, No. 27, July 13, 1933, Page 467, 1933. Photogravure 14 3/4 in × 10 3/8 in (37.47 cm × 26.35 cm). © 2021 The Heartfield Community of Heirs / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Installation view of Sheida Soleimani: Medium of Exchange, Atlanta Contemporary, 2018. Courtesy Atlanta Contemporary. Sheida Soleimani, Vice President and Secretary of Defense (United States), Halliburton CEOs, 2017. Archival pigment print, 60 × 40 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, Minister of Petroleum (Angola), Secretary of State (United States, 1973–77), 2017. Archival pigment print, 40 × 60 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, Inauguration (United States, Iraq), 2017. Archival pigment print, 18 × 24 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, Medium of Exchange, 2018. 32-minute digital video, screen grab. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, Medium of Exchange, 2018. 32-minute digital video, screen grab. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Sheida Soleimani, A Whole New World, 2014. Archival pigment print, 24 × 30 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Unknown Photographer, Claude McRay (i.e., McKay) and Baroness v. Freytag (i.e., Von Freytag-Loringhoven, n.d. (before 1924). Digital file from glass negative, 5 × 7 inches or smaller. Library of Congress, Bain News Service, LC-B25677-3 [P&P], LC-DIG-ggbain-33941. Tschabalala Self, Pocket Rocket, 2020. Digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on dyed canvas, 244 × 244 × 4 cm /

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96 × 96 × 1 1/2 in. © Tschabalala Self. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York. Photo: Matt Grubb. Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (The Sweet One [From an Ethnographic Museum]), 1926. Collage with watercolour © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021. Romare H. Bearden, The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, 1964. Collage; Photomechanical reproductions, paint, and graphite on board, 23.2 × 30.5 cm. © Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021). Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (A/A), 2019. Silkscreen ink on canvas, in two panels, overall: 243.8 × 192.7 cm; 96 × 75 7/8 in, each panel: 121.9 × 192.7 cm; 48 × 75 7/8 in. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler. Kemang Wa Lehulere performance during the opening of Dada South? outside the Iziko South African National Gallery, 2009. © Photo credit: Alexia Webster. donna Kukama performs The Great South African Queue, Iziko South African National Gallery, 2009. © Photo credit: Alexia Webster. Protestors carry paintings from the surrounding student residences to be burnt during the ‘Shackville’ protest at the University of Cape Town, 16 February 2016. © Photo: Ashleigh Furlong, for GroundUp. Buyani Duma and Thato Ramaisa perform as Desire Marea and Fela Gucci as the performance art duo FAKA. Photographed by Viviane Sassen, 2015. © Viviane Sassen. Brett Murray, Triumph, 2015. Two-screen video, 6 min. 48 sec. © Image courtesy of Brett Murray. Still image from Swarm Theory V1.0 directed by Kyla Davis and Daniel Buckland at the National Arts Festival, Makhanda, 2019. © Copyright: Kyla Davis. Photo Credit: Daylin Paul. Paula Rego, Salazar vomiting the homeland, 1960. Oil on canvas, 94 × 120 cm. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum – Modern Collection, Lisbon, Portugal. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London. Paula Rego, Trilogy of fear or The three faces of fear, c. 1964. Acrylic, oil, crayon, graphite and paper glued on canvas, 86 × 138 cm. Private collection. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London. Paula Rego, Iberian dawn, 1962. Acrylic, graphite and paper glued on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm. Private collection. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London.

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Paula Rego, The dogs of Barcelona, 1965. Oil, crayon and paper glued on canvas, 160 × 185 cm. Private collection. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London. 153 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933. © bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photo: Wilhelm Redemann. 166 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933. © bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photo: Wilhelm Redemann. 167 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933. © bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photo: Wilhelm Redemann. 168 Unknown. Internet meme from the Telegram channel Fashwave Images. Posted on 9 September 2019. 236 Unknown. Internet meme from the Telegram channel Fashwave Images. Posted on 1 October 2019. 239 Unknown. Internet meme from the Telegram channel Fashwave Images. Posted on 14 June 2019. 241 Jennifer Chan, Boyfriend, 2014. Video artwork (6:26), video still (at 1:24). © Jennifer Chan. 247 Soda Jerk with Sam Smith, Hollywood Burn, 2006. Digital video, 52 minutes. Courtesy the artists. 271 Joan Ross, ‘The naming of things’, The claiming of things, 2012. Digital video, 7:36 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney. 273 Soda Jerk & The Avalanches, The Was, 2016. Digital video, 13:40 minutes. Courtesy the artists. 275 Soda Jerk & The Avalanches, The Was, 2016. Digital video, 13:40 minutes. Courtesy the artists. 275 Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, A Dozen Cocktails – Please, 1920. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven papers. Special Collections and University Archives. University of Maryland Libraries. 282–83 Constant Dullaart, Phantom Love – Institutions Based on Lore, 2017. Screenshot. 286 Erica Scourti, Difficult to Find the Lost Things, 2019, detail. Printed with permission of the artist. 288 Flatness screengrab Feb 2019, showing artwork by Nikhil Vettukattil. © Shama Khanna, 2021. Image courtesy of flatness.eu, and reproduced with the permission of Shama Khanna. 302

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Inke Arns is Director of HMKV – Hartware MedienKunstVerein – in Dortmund, Germany. Since 1993, she is an independent curator and author specializing in media art, net cultures and Eastern Europe. She studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988–96) and in 2004 received her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin. She curated award-winning exhibitions at home and abroad, and is the author/editor of numerous articles/books on media art and net culture. Matthew Biro is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, where he also served as department chair between 2010 and 2016. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1998), The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (2009), Anselm Kiefer (2013), and Robert Heinecken and the Art of Appropriation (2022). Lisa Bogerts is a Berlin-based researcher focusing on political protest, power relations, visual analysis and art activism. She wrote her PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt and the New School for Social Research, New York. Annet Dekker is Assistant Professor Cultural Analysis and Archival & Information Studies, University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, London South Bank University. She has published in numerous journals and magazines and is editor of several volumes, including, among others, her recent publication Curating Digital Art (2021). Her monograph, Collecting and Conserving Net Art (2018) is a seminal work in the field of digital art conservation. Maik Fielitz is Researcher at the Jena Institute for Democracy and Civil Society and Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. His work focuses on far-right activism in Europe. Together with Nick Thurston he co-edited the volume Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right (2019).

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Sarah Hegenbart works as Lecturer in Art History at Technical University in Munich and is currently acting as a substitute for the professorship in art research with a focus on contemporary art at the Braunschweig University of Art. She is a member of Die Junge Akademie Mainz and member of the consortium of the Horizon 2020 research project Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies. Prior to her current position, Sarah completed a PhD on Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, an MSt in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and a Magister in Philosophy and History of Art at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Meredith Hoy is Associate Professor of Art Theory and Intermedia in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her first monograph was From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (2017). Hoy’s interdisciplinary research examines frictions, intersections and contiguities between technological, ecological, scientific and social systems. Her most current research projects address animality, biophilia and the relationship between human and non-human entities. IOCOSE investigate how the narratives surrounding the future of technology leave traces on the present. They have been working with visual media, video installations and prints. Founded in 2006 by Matteo Cremonesi, Filippo Cuttica, Davide Prati and Paolo Ruffino, IOCOSE have been exhibiting at major institutions including MLZ Art Dep (2021), MAMbo (2018), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2017), The Photographers Gallery (2018, 2016), Tate Modern (2011), Science Gallery (2012), Jeu de Paume (2011) and Transmediale (2013, 2015). http://iocose.org. Mara-Johanna Kölmel is a curator, lecturer and art historian with a special interest in (post-)digital art and culture. She obtained her MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art and holds a BA in Cultural Studies from Leuphana University Lüneburg where she has also completed her PhD on Sculpture in the Augmented Sphere. Mara has performed international curatorial roles for the Biennale of Sydney, Kunsthalle Hamburg & Akademie Schloss Solitude, also realizing exhibitions with Approved by Pablo in London and peer to space in Berlin. She has presented her research at conferences internationally and published among others in Texte zur Kunst and Die Nadel. Mara is the co-founder of SALOON London, a network for women in the London art world. Natalie P. Koerner is Assistant Professor in Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy and at the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research spans contemporary and early modern notions of privacy, (digital) archives and climatic spatial imaginaries. Combining theory with practice, her studio work comprises architectural projects and

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artistic research. Koerner studied at Cambridge University and at the ETH, Zurich, and has collaborated with architectural and artistic practices such as Studio Olafur Eliasson. donna Kukama is a transdisciplinary artist and creative researcher whose approach to epistemic disobedience informs her ‘writing’ of histories through performance. She has exhibited and presented work at several major international institutions, biennales and museums. Kukama is a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. She was previously a lecturer at the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2011–2021), a guest professor at HBK Braunschweig University, Germany (2019–2020), and is a visiting artist at HEAD Genève (2021–2023). She is a PhD candidate at the University of Plymouth and currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany, where she is a professor of Contemporary Art with a focus on the Global South at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM). Kemang Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 in Cape Town, and lives there. He has a BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (2011). A presentation of Kemang Wa Lehulere’s installation ‘I cut my skin to liberate the splinter’ was shown at the Tate Modern, London (2019). Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at Pasquart Art Centre in Biel, Switzerland (2018); MAXXI, Rome (2017); the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle (2017); the Art Institute of Chicago (2016); Gasworks, London (2015); Lombard Freid Projects, New York (2013); the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2011); and the Association of Visual Arts in Cape Town (2009), in addition to Stevenson (2018; 2016; 2015; 2012) and Marian Goodman Gallery (2018). montage mädels are a five-woman artists’ collective from the US and UK, founded the morning after Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016. Their net-art photomontages denounce contemporary mass media’s hate-driven ideologies and probe the conditions of our Late Capitalist moment. Exhibitions: ‘Landscape: A Reconstruction’, Rutland House (New York, 2019); East Wing Biennial, Somerset House (London, 2018); ‘Nice Sky’, Galerie 102 (Berlin, 2017); Brick Lane Gallery (London, 2017). Features: Abstract Mag TV; The Courtauldian. Leonor de Oliveira is an integrated researcher from the Institute of Art History, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Her recent publications include the monograph Portuguese Artists in London: Shaping Identities in Post-War Europe (2020). She has been conducting original research on Paula Rego’s early production that resulted in exhibitions that she co-curated at the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego (Portugal). Other topics of research include Iberian post-war context and creative agency; women’s creativity, citizenship and democratization.

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Roberto Simanowski is a scholar of media and cultural studies and holds a PhD in literary studies and a Venia Legendi in media studies. He is the founder and editor of the journal on digital culture and aesthetics, dichtungdigital.org (1999–2014) and the author of several books on digital culture and politics, including Digital Art and Meaning (2011), Data Love and Facebook Society (2016 and 2018), as well as The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (2018; CHOICE award for Outstanding Academic Titles for 2019) and Waste: A New Media Primer (2018). Simanowski worked as professor of German Studies at Brown University and as professor of Digital Media Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Basel and at City University of Hong Kong. Joshua Simon is a curator and author based in Philadelphia, and the former director and chief curator at MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, Tel Aviv (2012–17). Simon is visiting critic at the Fine Arts program at the University of Pennsylvania, and teaches at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at Leuphana University, Germany. He is the author of Neomaterialism (2013), and editor of Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Want Communism (2019). Vid Simoniti is lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, where he also runs MA Art, Philosophy and Cultural Institutions. His research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics and politics; recent publications include a contribution to Adrian Piper: A Reader (Museum of Modern Art, New York), ‘Living Images in Bio-Art’ (Oxford Art Journal) and ‘Assessing Socially Engaged Art’ (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). Before joining Liverpool in 2018, he was a research fellow and lecturer in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, and he obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. His book Art Against the World, which investigates the place of contemporary art within the democratic public sphere, is forthcoming with Yale University Press in 2023. Rebecca Smith is a lecturer and researcher at the Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University. Rebecca completed her PhD Parafiction as Matter and Method in 2020. Her research interests include art history, contemporary art, digital cultures, performance, politics, technological infrastructures and truth discourses. She has published in peer-reviewed journals, written for transmediale 2021 and presented at international conferences including Visible Evidence 2022, Gdansk, RE:SOUND 2019, Aalborg, RESAW 2019, Amsterdam, and the Association for Art History Annual Conference 2018, London. Jack Southern is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer, currently working at the University of Gloucestershire and at City and Guilds of London Art School. His research into the social, cultural and political implications of our increasingly mediated contemporary experience has been disseminated

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widely through symposium and conference contributions, as well as published writing. Current work specifically focuses on exploring creative modes of digital intervention and resistance in response to the exploitative nature of financialized models of digital/data technologies. Jaime Tsai is lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School, Sydney. Her research explores how the strategies of Dada and Surrealism inform alternative knowledge practices in contemporary Australian art. Recent publications include ‘Equivocal Taxonomies: Fiona Hall and the Logic of Display’ (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art), and ‘Jane Graverol’ (International Encyclopedia of Surrealism). Her recent curatorial project CAUGHT STEALING (The National Art School Gallery, Sydney) explored Surrealist inspired theft as a tactic in the work of Australian artists such as Daniel Boyd, Destiny Deacon, and Fiona Hall. Roger van Wyk is an independent curator, artist and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. His critically acclaimed exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 2010 explored the legacies of Dada in South African art, and has spurred ongoing research and discourse. He coauthored an essay for the exhibition Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other (Zurich’s Museum Rietberg and Berlinische Galerie, 2016) that drew attention to the role of the avant-garde in South Africa. His training as a sculptor and urban planner combines in his critical contributions to public art in South Africa. He consults to the City of Cape Town on public arts development, and flies the flag for Situationism, and art as a catalyst for social change, through his involvement with the South African chapter of Burning Man, AfrikaBurn.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book emerged out of the political climate the editors experienced in 2016 while undertaking research at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. For many, 2016 was a shell shock that began with the UK voting to leave the EU and was further amplified by the presidential election in the US. A decade of financial crisis and social insecurity had resulted in a political surge to the far-right in Europe and the US. The outdated ideologies back on the political agenda, however, came in the form of progressive-looking social media campaigns commingling seemingly humorous memes and videos with hipster aesthetics. Observing how central aesthetic and cultural means featured in this resurgence of the right and blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, we asked ourselves as art historians how we ought to respond. Could the use of images in the twentieth-century avant-gardes – and in particular Dada’s visual concepts, such as montage, collage, the play with mimicry, acts of provocation and irony as well as the ready-made – perhaps even have contributed to the present moment? What is the difference between Dadaist sabotaging the ‘truth’ in their work and a political communicator intentionally misleading the public? These questions are also linked to a view which had become increasingly popular around this time: holding postmodernist thinkers responsible for the dissolution of truth in the era of post-truth. While we found these attacks too simplistic and untenable, we were keen to dig deeper into questions related to the responsibility of the historical avant-gardes, visual cultures and postmodernist thinkers. In addition, we wanted to understand better how the increase of digital (visual) communication impacts on our capacities to differentiate between fact and fiction. This initially led to a panel we organized for the Association for Art History Annual Conference, which took place at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in Spring 2018. We thank all our participants on this panel, whose contributions form the core of this volume. The scope of the book was further expanded and refined by contributors including artists, scholars and curators whom we approached after the conference. We were thrilled that our array of contributors were as excited as we were about the project and generously wrote new texts, accepting the constraints of not being paid an honorarium. Equally, numerous artists whose work is featured and discussed in this book generously granted us permission to use their artwork. In the process of refining this volume, we benefited enormously from the xviii

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feedback of two anonymous peer reviewers whom we would like to thank very warmly. We also would like to thank the fantastic team at Bloomsbury, in particular Ross Fraser-Smith, April Peake and Yvonne Thouroude. Without Professor Sarah Wilson who introduced the editors to each other this book would not have come about. The generous support of the Dr Marschall Foundation at the Technical University of Munich helped us to finalize the index of this book. A big thank you to Karl Hughes for thoughts and comments that went beyond editing. Our academic affiliations with the Leuphana University in Lüneburg and the Technical University of Munich enabled us to develop this project further, for which we are very grateful. Fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald provided the perfect framework for putting the finishing touches to this project. Last but not least, we would like to say a massive thank you to our family and friends who had to bear numerous weekends and weekdays without us while we were working on Dada Data. Thank you, George, Leander, Malia and Philip for your love, encouragement and infinite support.

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Introduction: From Dada Tricks to Post-Truth Politics Sarah Hegenbart and Mara-Johanna Kölmel

The era of post-truth politics poses a new challenge for contemporary art practice. In 2016, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump gave rise to the term ‘post-truth politics’ – a type of politics that ignores accepted standards of truths, objective facts and critical thinking, and appeals instead to people’s emotions and personal beliefs.1 Misinformation, alternative facts, fake news, hoaxes and parafictions mark the discursive currency of the post-truth age. But is this really a description of ‘post-truth’? Does it not in fact hark back to an earlier period? Loving ‘the absurd’, knowing that ‘life asserts itself in contradictions’, and enjoying ‘every play at hide and seek in which there is an inherent power of deception’ is not how Hugo Ball describes post-truth politics.2 Rather, he references a much earlier time: the emergence of the Dada movement in diverse centres from 1916 on. Ball’s Dada colleague Hans Arp summarizes the aim of Dada in his ‘Notes from a Dada Diary’ as transforming ‘the perceptible world of man today into a pious senseless world without reason’.3 Parallels between Dada’s decentring of a world order structured by reason and oriented towards truth and the attack on truth by post-truth politicians spring to mind.4 To take into account how characteristic the appeal to emotions is for post-truth politics, Jayson Harsin introduced the concept of ‘emo-truth’: ‘Emo-truth is truth where emotion serves as inference ... It is felt 1

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(though not necessarily consciously), and not accompanied by long temporal reasoning.’5 Needless to say, this description could also be applied to the arts which operate on an aesthetic, hence affective, emotive level. Might this mean that a liberal and left avant-garde movement paved the way for a novel type of politics, which is exercised by rather conservative politicians with an alt-right mindset? Are post-truth politicians perverting artistic ideas of the twentieth-century avant-gardes? Or are the Dadaists and their artistic attacks on truth even partly to blame for the times we live in? How can art foster critical discourse that is often abandoned when subscribing to simplified notions of reality? These and related questions have inspired this anthology, which touches on the relation between the art and tactics of the avant-gardes and the perversion of truth in contemporary politics. In considering an array of cultural and artistic representations, this edited volume seeks to offer new insights into the artistic modes of persuasion and resistance marking our post-truth era. The goal is to generate new ideas about the reading of our contemporary moment through the lens of artistic production from Dada to data-driven, post-truth politics. We believe that an analysis of the recent phenomenon against the backdrop of the Dada movement is fruitful for numerous reasons. First, this comparison will illustrate that the attack on truth is actually not a novel phenomenon, but has a much longer history. Dada, however, as we will argue, is not to be blamed for the current distortion of ‘truth(s)’. Rather the early Dadaists’ attack on ‘truth’ actually has little to do with the norms, values and beliefs of the post-truth society. Taking the Dada perspective on board will, secondly, enable us to counter an argument that has recently become very popular. Researchers have attacked the scholarship of leftliberal postmodernism, to some extent adumbrated by the subversions of Dada, arguing that postmodernism enabled the discursive climate of ‘posttruth’ in the first place.6 Such observations bring up the two main queries implicitly inspiring this volume: 1 2

How do Dada strategies pertain to our current moment marked by post-truth politics, information floods and big data? If populist politicians persuade the masses by tailored data strategies that have Dada analogies, how can contemporary art highlight the neglected nuances of our post-truth moment and especially its cultural representation?

Before diving into the argument in more detail, there are a number of concepts structuring this book which require elaboration. While these will be further discussed and refined by the individual contributions to this volume, the following provides a short overview of the notions of Dada, post-truth, the digital and the alt-right.

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Dada ‘What is Dada? An Art? A Philosophy? A Politics? A Fire Insurance? Or: State Religion? is Dada really Energy? or is it Nothing at all, i.e., everything?’ Written out in bold lettering, Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann pondered the meaning of Dada in his mock advertisement for his journal Der Dada 2.7 By overtly seeming to simultaneously announce and deny the meaning of Dada, Hausmann was deliberately treading the fine line between fact and fiction. Working in the aftermath of the atrocities of World War I and a climate of rising nationalism, the Dadaists were quick to understand that a longenduring balance between the ‘fictional in language and the concreteness of experience’ had been shattered.8 Dada’s protagonists, based in Berlin, Paris, New York, Cologne, Hanover and Zurich, investigated the mechanisms of behaviours, words, symbols and objects, and how they provided working ‘fictions’ in their immediate surroundings.9 Their interest was further catalysed by the rise of a modern media landscape. Propaganda poster campaigns, the development of communication technologies (radio, cinema, newsreel), wireless telegraphy, innovation in printing technologies, and the circulation of massive quantities of photographic images triggered a postwar mass-media explosion.10 The development engendered a palpable shift from what Dada expert Hanne Bergius has called ‘the bourgeois function of explication and enlightenment in the press to that of manipulation through sensational reporting’.11 Satire, transgressive humour and parafictions were important tools for Dadaists in reflecting such change. They exploited the press as a testing ground for alternative fictions allowing them to gain attention and reach. In Berlin, Johannes Baader together with Raoul Hausmann used the local press ecology to declare the formation of the Dada Republic of Berlin-Nikolassee.12 In Paris, Picabia and Tzara convinced a newspaper to report a fictitious quarrel between poets.13 In Zurich, reports of fictive events in the Dada Soiree were planted in the press.14 The name ‘Dada’ was chosen by a random dictionary search. The historical meaning of the word is, among other things, ‘hobby horse’, as Tristan Tzara mentions in his ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1918).15 The choice of the name indicates that the Dada artists wanted to move away from a solemn understanding of art defined by the beauty it possesses. Rather they sought to form a transnational movement, which dissolved the artistic genres, rejected an elitist conception of art as high culture, which integrated everyday material and popular culture. The transnational openness of Dada invites a translocation of Dada to other regions, e.g. the Global South, as exhibitions such as Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance (2009–10 at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town) and Dada Africa (2016–18 at Rietberg Museum Zurich, the Berlinische Galerie Berlin, in conjunction with the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie) have brought out.

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Dada’s diverse artistic strategies – never unified by one particular artistic style – aimed to arouse emotions and stimulate reactions in their audience. This, in turn, enabled them to approach and disclose the underlying mechanism of their surrounding cultural life, to render them visible and perhaps even more concrete. By means of scandal and shock their interventions sought to reveal ‘the whole of brutal reality’.16 The Dadaists targeted and parodied the prevalent structures, rhetoric and beliefs of their times, embedding their critique of society in the very communicative means of that society. Dada thereby proceeded from a self-elevating concept involving many truths, in whose production and manipulation the media could be co-opted.

Dada and conceptions of (post-)truth The label ‘post-truth’ is a problematic one as the prefix suggests that there was once a time in which the truth existed. The distortion of truth in politics, however, started long before ‘post-truth’ was named the 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. The tactic of dismissing those facts conflicting with one’s own political views as ‘fake news’ is not in principle new. It has its roots in a long history of suppression and oppression of anything not recognized as desirable or legitimate. Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann and Curtis Sullivan hence describe ‘posttruth’ as tainted by ‘racial amnesia’, which has led to the misinformed belief that an agreement on what counts as truth once existed within a society.17 There is an analogy to be drawn here with European colonization and white settler colonialism, which simply ignored the epistemic systems of Indigenous people. As the truth or ‘the idea of any transcendental universal Truth (capital T)’ requires a normative principle, scholars such as Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou suggested that the origins of post-truth can be traced back to Enlightenment thinking.18 Most famously, Jean-François Lyotard emphasized that multiple narratives have replaced a singular meta-narrative embedded in the belief that a singular truth exists.19 The publication in 1979 of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition clearly marked that perspectival approaches to truths in the plural have replaced the belief into a universal truth. Farkas and Schou emphasize that there have ‘historically been different truths (small t) that have been the product of social and political struggles’.20 Laying the blame for the perversion of our political climate in the ‘posttruth era’ at the door of postmodernism – and avant-garde art movements such as Dada – ignores the fact that Dada artists as well as postmodernist thinkers were concerned with demolishing existing power structures. ‘Posttruth’ politicians, by contrast, are often driven by the desire to sustain precisely those power structures which maintain their often white and male privilege.21 How ‘successful’ post-truth politicians were in implementing these structures that will continue to shape the landscape even after their time

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in office is exemplified by the appointment of three supreme court justices during the presidency of Trump. When the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on 18 September 2020, she was quickly replaced with the conservative law professor Amy Coney Barrett – a decision that led to a conservative majority in the supreme court and created ‘a new legal landscape that could last at least 30 years’.22 The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 by Trump supporters who did not want to accept the election of Joe Biden revealed how falsehoods and lies about the 2020 US presidential elections turned into violence. Conspiracy ideologies disseminated by pro-Trump supporters and QAnon further claimed that Trump would be reinstated on 13 August 2021.23 As Sam Levine argues, ‘2021 was the year that America’s democracy came under attack from within’, as Republicans used numerous strategies, among them gerrymandering, to limit the political influence of people of colour and the continuous dissemination of falsehoods about the election.24 This is mirrored in the CNN poll which led to the outcome that 78 per cent of Republicans claim that ‘Biden did not win’.25 The disproportionally high murder rate of Black people through the police, e.g. in the case of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis, based on racist stereotypes, highlights another problematic failure of democratic institutions within the US, but also globally, as the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests highlighted. The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot two people during Black Lives Matter protests and subsequently turned into a ‘hero’ of the alt-right, proved again how these oppressive structures persevere in the post-Trump era in the US.26 Alt-right ideologues have familiarized themselves with theoretical approaches from the left in order to invert them.27 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie described this quite memorably when remembering his first encounter with Steve Bannon. In 2013, Wylie was instructed to meet ‘Steve from America’ in Cambridge.28 In an interview with journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Wylie described Bannon as: Interesting. Really interested in ideas. He’s the only straight man I’ve ever talked to about intersectional feminist theory. He saw its relevance straightaway to the oppressions that conservative, young white men feel.29 This example illustrates how such prominent alt-right figures conspire to maintain a ‘political ideology that has as its core myth the homogeneous nation—a romantic and gendered version of the homeland and homeland culture, both of which act as emotional resources in the appeal to ontological security’.30 Since avant-garde art movements beginning with Dada and streams of cultural theory rooted in postmodernism have ‘endangered’ this myth, it is not surprising that culture wars feature centrally in the post-truth age to protect it. Interestingly, these culture wars have led to an ‘appropriation’ of left-wing liberal strategies by right-wing thinkers that appear to use

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Dadaist tactics for their own political ends. In order to understand how culture is exploited in the current post-truth climate, this volume views our post-truth predicament against the backdrop of the Dada movement in order to arrive at a better understanding of current phenomena. Post-truth has frequently been linked to the argument that the crisis of democracy is expressing itself in an increase of populism.31 Even before the emergence of post-truth, Colin Crouch announced the era of post-politics.32 According to Farkas and Schou, the ‘problem is not that truth is disappearing, but that democracy is’.33 Felix Stalder, professor of digital culture, suggests that the experience of a loss of democracy is linked with the increase of a society’s capacity to communicate, which is decoupled from opportunities to participate and decide.34 Stalder relates this to an ‘enormous amplification of cultural opportunities – an expression of the culture of digitality’.35 While the digitization of society throughout the 1990s was initially celebrated as an opportunity to increase democratization and freedom of speech through enhanced participation of citizens and a widening of discourse to regions beyond the mainstream centres of exchange in the Global South, it appears today that the opposite has transpired. Stalder emphasizes how the Dada strategy of montage might indicate a way out: ‘The montage deals with assembling disparate precast elements ... This gave the experience of multiple ruptures within modernity – the fragmentation and disruption a new aesthetic form.’36 Indeed, as a culturally critical phenomenon, Dada can be freed from its direct context and be seen as having a direct relevance to the twenty-first century.37 However, the Dada aesthetics of montage is now frequently seized by alt-right ideologues in their visual culture, and features in memes driving conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

From Dada tricks to data-driven politics One of the many differences between our post-truth environment and the Dada movement era is, of course, the prevalence of digital infrastructures and the internet. Today, most aspects of the everyday are digitally mediated. Digital technologies have inscribed themselves in our lives. ‘Being digital’ as much as ‘being online’ has become the default condition. While this development can be traced within the scientific and technological developments of our information age, it is only in recent years that the focus of artistic and critical discourse has distanced itself from notions such as New Media as a discrete entity of culture. Rather, a discussion has evolved about a conscious reconfiguration of all culture through the digital, a post-digital condition.38 In this sense, the digital is not to be understood as a medium, but as a mode of configuration, which consequently does not lead to a subordination of existing media, but to their hybrid transformation.

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In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff carefully maps out the shift from industrial capitalism based on the exploitation of resources and labour to surveillance capitalism.39 This form of capitalism profits from the capture, rendering and analysis of behavioural data. Surveillance capitalists have commodified information to the point that people’s behaviour data points have become more valuable than their actual existence.40 Hidden behind a smoke mirror of ethics, accountability and free choice architectures, Zuboff makes explicit how surveillance companies such as Google and Facebook quash and harness free will as a means to profit.41 Without abiding by the standard research ethics of consent framework, they have significant social and political influence, thus endangering the project of liberalism and our individual sovereignty. Such systematic ‘digital dispossession’ has played into the hands of data-driven politics by post-truth politicians.42 In the case of Donald Trump, employees of Google, Twitter and Facebook were actively embedded in his election campaign and shaped its communication strategies.43 In countries such as Germany, Facebook’s global government and political team provided their services to the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland to help them enter the Bundestag.44 Furthermore, behavioural micro-targeting and psycho-graphics as used by Cambridge Analytica have allowed political actors to model political campaigns to individuals and actively influence voter behaviours. The commodification of personal data through ‘surveillance capitalism’ has thereby made the spreading of lies and sensational misinformation easier and more persuasive.45 The Covid-19 pandemic labelled by the World Health Organization as ‘infodemic’ is another good example of the impact of misleading and false information spread through on- and offline networks.46 It has fuelled antivaccine narratives and the distrust in health authorities and public health response.47 Research data confirms a clear connection between ‘anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, anti-government actors, and extreme right-wing movements’.48 This intersection becomes particularly evident in the overlap of Covid-19 misinformation and QAnon conspiracies, for example, at antimask or anti-lockdown demonstrations.49 The QAnon movement started forming in 2017 on the online imageboard 4-chan.50 An anonymous user called Q, who claimed to have high-level security clearance, started posting cryptic messages about Trump’s supposed battle against child-trafficking corrupt elites and a ‘deep state’.51 QAnon quickly started spreading from a fringe movement to platforms including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, evolving into a cult-like movement with millions of followers.52 With the conspiracy theory becoming mainstream, it has been linked to a number of brutal offline incidents such as a series of mass shootings in the US and the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.53 As misinformation about the pandemic converges with falsehoods related to QAnon, a hybrid threat landscape emerges that blurs ‘boundaries between disinformation, hate speech and harassment, conspiracy theories

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and extremist mobilisation’.54 QAnon, whose origin can be linked to liveaction role-playing (LARP), Cicada online puzzles and ‘shit-posting’ – the deliberately provocative and off-topic spreading of fictitious content – has become an epitome of a post-truth predicament.55

Dada and the alt-right Digital platforms have empowered individuals and organizations from across the political spectrum to spread misinformation to audiences globally.56 They have increasingly given rise to a culture of hate, deception and extremism.57 According to recent studies, however, fake news and misinformation linked to extremist, conspiratorial or racist content is proportionally more consumed and shared by social media network users on the (far)-right wing of the political landscape.58 In this context, the ‘farright’ has become an umbrella term for actors on the far end of the political spectrum. According to Cas Mudde’s definition, right-wing extremist movements are characterized by a combination of at least three of the following five features: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and strong state advocacy.59 Other terms used in relation to groups on the right of the political spectrum are ‘alt-lite’ or ‘new right’, a term for far-right groups and individuals who oppose globalism and social progressivism. While the ‘alt-right’ (abbreviation for ‘alternative right’) intersects with these groups, it has mainly become ‘a catchall phrase for a loose group of extreme-right individuals and organisations who promote white nationalism’.60 Needless to say, the alt-right is far from alternative but is inextricably linked to historical fascism, Nazism and white supremacist thinking.61 It uses distinct vocabulary and ideological reference points linking back to its origins in US online communities leading up to Trump’s election. Since then, however, it has become increasingly transnational. Since the 1990s, the internet and later social media have become important breeding grounds for the dissemination of far-right ideologies.62 Alongside strategic alliances between differing but globally interconnected right-wing groups, their early adoption of digital technology and at times coordinated, data-driven online strategies has led to the mainstreaming of extremist, farright ideas.63 Nationalist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, anti-democratic or fascist ideas have migrated from the fringe of society into the centre ground, asserting significant political pressure on the neoliberal democracies of Europe and the US.64 This attack on the values of an open and free society, as research has argued, is predominantly driven by aesthetic and cultural means targeted at influencing media and culture.65 Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies is one of the first studies into the role that online sub- or netcultures played in the emergence of an organized and globally connected alt-right movement. According to the author, the non-conformist aesthetic of the right-wing online cultures shares more similarities with the left-wing,

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1960s counterculture movements and certain artistic historical avant-gardes than with a more traditional right wing.66 Other publications have come to similar conclusions by tracing the adaptation of left-wing intellectual attitudes, aesthetic and performative protest strategies by populist politicians and members of the new right.67 Indeed, strategies such as transgression, exploded mimicry, acts of provocation, humour, the distortion of reality, as well as attacks on elites and rationality, have for a long time been endorsed by artistic avant-gardes and left subcultures and, in particular, the Dada movement.

The structure of this book Dada’s artistic response to the aggression, nationalism and rising fascism defining its time thereby offers a fruitful backdrop and analogy to our contemporary situation. This book analyses diverse cultural and artistic representations spanning from Dada collage to data montage under categories foregrounding their thematic and conceptual affinity. Such synchronic presentation promises to reveal new cross-historical connections between Dada strategies and their resurfacing in data-infused environments. We also hope to suggest the importance of discontinuity in constructing a history of the relation between the Dada movement and our present moment and to draw attention to the significance of ruptures and misalignments in this relation. Bringing together visual and textual contributions by artists and theorists, the book thereby functions like a Dada-data montage. Based on a panel that we organized at the Courtauld Institute of Art during the AAH conference in London, our volume gathers contributions from an international group of emerging and established scholars and practitioners. Representing different disciplines and specializations, some texts are written in an academic, others more in an essayistic and playful, style. The title we have adopted to present this material reflects the shared intellectual and methodological concerns of this diverse group of contributors.68 Their contributions are dedicated to carefully unpacking these questions to further explore the complex ways Dadaesque strategies, data power and post-truth political discourse intertwine. The international and trans-disciplinary list of contributors thus significantly expand the horizons and sociocultural perspectives of such a relation. The publication is rounded off by artistic contributions which have been developed in dialogue with its theoretical contributions. In Our Collective Practice: A Visual Essay, the montage mädels have resurrected the Dadaist photomontage to reflect on the maelstrom of data consumed online on a daily basis. Their work denounces hate-riven online cultures, resisting their toxicity with creativity and sisterly communality. In Dog of Orion, Kemang Wa Lehulere highlights how Dada inspired the liberation struggle in South Africa when suggesting to interpret his Dada sculpture against the backdrop

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of Sandile Dikeni’s poem ‘Guava Juice’. The artist researcher donna Kukama designed an artistic intervention specifically for our volume that opens up the Dada archive and sneaks Dada Data into it. IOCOSE’s work Dadasourcing appropriates the exploitative and colonialist dynamics of crowdsourcing. The collective experiments ways of undoing them as part of the same gesture, and explores their potential for creative, critical and surrealist acts.

The chapters ‘Part One: From Dada to Data’ begins with a historical survey of the Dada movement and its legacy. Mara-Johanna Kölmel’s text, ‘Dadadatadada: From Dada to Data and Back Again’, investigates whether Dadaist strategies of abstraction, hacking and photomontage still bear relevance in our big data economies. The chapter turns its focus onto data-driven strategies of persuasion on the far-right political spectrum appearing to have Dadaist analogies. It concludes by speculating how an engagement with the tactics of Dada can help foster critical vocabularies for confronting the complexities posed by our age of algorithmic power and big data. Meredith Hoy’s contribution, ‘Clouds, Critique & Contradiction: Programming Dissent in Dada and Data Art’, continues such reflections by tracing critical notions of resistance and dissent from Dada to data art. Dadaist tactics, Hoy argues, resurface in the works of data artists to reveal the contingency and instability of code, software, interfaces and the ubiquitous computing devices that shape contemporary techno-cultural landscapes. The speculative dialogue traces the asynchronously shared goal of Dada and data artists to launch campaigns against cultural complacency and political complicity. Berlin Dada’s performative actions in the public sphere becomes the departure point of Rebecca Smith’s essay, ‘The Legacy of the Berlin Dada Media Hoaxes in Contemporary Parafictive Acts’. Smith contrasts the performative actions by Berlin Dada members Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann with contemporary parafictive acts conducted by UBERMORGEN and The Yes Men to demonstrate the legacy of Dada’s media hoaxes in contemporary artistic modes of intervention. Her text probes the importance of effective artistic strategies as a means to alter perceptions and, consequently, comment upon and challenge the era of post-truth politics. By exploring Dada’s historical motives and strategies and how they resonate in contemporary artistic practices, Part One thus carefully unpacks Dada’s motives for attacking institutions and the ways in which they differ from post-truth politics. ‘Part Two: Global Dada’ focuses on the reception of Dada strategies in a global context. In ‘Sheida Soleimani, Cyborg: Photomontage in an Expanding Network’, Matthew Biro analyses how Soleimani employs the digital to develop Dadaist photomontage further. The American artist of Iranian

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descent operates like a ‘social critic’ and a ‘subaltern cyborg’, as she employs contemporary technologies to negotiate between a broad range of global themes, such as colonialism, gender violence, and Iranian history and perception. In ‘Black Dada Data: Collage as a Tool of Resistance against White Supremacy Thinking in the Digital Age’, Sarah Hegenbart traces the history of so-called ‘post-truth politics’ back to settler colonialism and white supremacist thinking. She explores how collage in the digital age provides a platform of resistance for Black artists to invert the canon established by structures of white supremacy. The South African curator Roger van Wyk explores in ‘Dada’s African South’ how Dada’s rejection of Eurocentric Enlightenment thinking resonates in the artistic practice of South African artists who challenged apartheid thinking and the ways in which its racist ideologies still impact on contemporary South African society. His essay also interrogates the colonial and neocolonial aspects of post-truth politics, which is mirrored in the centralized collection of data and the control through artificial intelligence systems. Relegating to the political agency of images within the Dada movement, Leonor de Oliveira’s essay, ‘Paula Rego: A Dada Attitude against Authority in the Post-War Period’ on the Portuguese artist, restores art as the horizon of political possibility, arguing for iconographies of resistance. ‘Part Three: Big Dada Data’ examines the systems and operations that make up the assemblages of Dada and data. It contrasts the role big data plays in steering our patterns of behaviour with Dada strategies to influence our unconscious. In ‘Big Dada, Big Data: Schwitters’s Merzbau, the Private and the Trash’, Natalie P. Koerner examines Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau as a precursor of digital archives. Understanding social media as a type of Merzbau, she interrogates how data trash, the vast material of data produced, impacts on the structures of our personal memory and the archives of cultural memory more broadly. Exploring the phenomenon of Big Data Mining, Roberto Simanowski analyses how digital technologies impact on our conception of the public sphere. In ‘Identity, Ecology, and the Arts in the Age of Big Data Mining’, he introduces ‘data love’ and dismantles the economic interests behind data collection. The implication of data love is the creation of artworks that only aim to please – e.g. to achieve the goal of attention-seeking in terms of numerous ‘likes’ – are opposed to the form of resistance targeted by Dada avant-gardes. Joshua Simon’s ‘The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution’ carefully examines assemblages of technology and labour in order to assess our neocolonial digital frontiers linking back to a time of racialization and colonization. By drawing parallels between the archaeology of various media and art history, Simon traces a lineage of machinic, image-making technologies that reaches from artistic advances in the early modern period to extractive and oppressive forms of automation such as machine vision. This part thus traces genealogies of the digital and relates them to the artistic sphere providing a nuanced account of data aesthetics.

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‘Part Four: Dada x Alt-Right. Faking the Truth’ critically interrogates whether artistic avant-gardes, such as Dada, potentially paved the way for the era of post-truth politics and the rhetorical strategies of the alt-right. Inke Arns, curator of the The Alt-Right Complex at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, shows how contemporary artists shed light on hidden networks of the alt-right by employing visual tactics, which resemble the aesthetic strategies of the Dada avant-garde. Her contribution, ‘Down the Rabbit Hole of the Alt-Right Complex: Artists Exploring FarRight Online Culture’, persuasively argues that not only have the alt-right appropriated Dada tactics, such as transgression or a distortion of reality, but also the very artists who debunk how the alt-right sabotages the truth. In ‘Fashwave: The Alt-Right’s Aestheticization of Politics and Violence’, Lisa Bogerts and Maik Fielitz analyse the aesthetics of the alt-right against the backdrop of white supremacist thinking. They argue that the production of fascist art possesses a strategic value in the process of radicalizing online communities. Vid Simoniti focuses in his ‘Post-Internet Art and the Alt-Right Visual Culture’ on two phenomena of digital collage, which can both be traced back to Dada principles. While post-internet art, the first phenomenon, critiques the capitalist modes of the art world, neofascist visual culture utilizes Dada tactics to attack ‘mainstream society’ more broadly. While pursuing entirely different aims, both forms of digital imagery employ Dada humour. If democratic institutions coined by liberalism facilitate the rise of the alt-right and threaten the very foundations of freedom of thought and expression, how does genuine artistic resistance need to be rethought in the era of post-truth? ‘Part Five: Dada Data Tactics’ contrasts the demagogic rhetorics discussed in the previous section with affirmative artistic approaches. Jaime Tsai’s contribution, ‘Pixel Pirates: Theft as Strategy in the Art of Joan Ross and Soda Jerk’, turns its critical eye on the artistic strategies of theft and remix as means of resistance. Berlin Dada challenged the ownership of language and campaigned for social justice during a period marked by political ferment and the rise of fascism. Tsai sees their strategies of theft resuscitated in the Australian video artists Soda Jerk and Joan Ross’s use of critical remix practices. Re-emerging in a different context, Dadaist tactics are here employed to contest the corporate control of the cultural sphere, its form of knowledge production and cultural memory linked to the colonial mythologies that underpin Australian national identity. Annet Dekker’s essay, ‘Precarious Data Aesthetics. An Exploration of Tactics, Tricksters and Idiocy in Data’, interrogates how the notion of tactics as a mode of intervention into the existing status quo has changed over the decades from Dada to data. By comparing the performative and linguistic interventions of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to contemporary tactical media artists, Constant Dullaart and Erica Scourti, Dekker’s essay carefully examines Dadaist tactics of defamiliarization, destabilization and disruption, and how they pertain to artistic work critically reflecting contemporary

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digital infrastructures. Jack Southern rounds off the section with a reflection on aesthetic and activist strategies as a means to create forms of digital resistance and facilitate new ways of developing communities both on- and offline. His contribution, ‘The Multiple Narratives of Post-Truth Politics, Told through Pictures’, draws parallels between financialized digital architectures, the precarity of our Western democratic systems, and the ascendency of populist narrators emboldened by the collective coherence of the far-right. Southern calls for a re-evaluation of our relationship to the digital ecosystem and advocates for approaches led by digital equality, cultural consciousness and social justice. In the sum of theoretical and visual approaches to the topic, this volume attempts to overcome the mono-perspectival approach endorsed by the era of post-truth politics. Finally, we hope to have mapped out various facets that motivate a reading of Dada and data as interrelated. Dada thereby also exemplifies a model of resistance that is needed to respond to the authoritarian but anonymous heteronomy pervading societies in the age of big data. The title Dada Data foreshadows such complex trajectories and ruptures examined throughout this book from the early Dada avant-gardes to our data-driven contemporaneity. We envision that the speculative cross-reading of Dada and data will generate many productive openings for thinking about the challenges of our contemporary moment. It will also bring out quite clearly that it is no longer a liberal avant-garde that revises Dada strategies for contemporary times. We are hoping that this book will stimulate further reflection on these issues. It is time to sharpen our digital tools, inventing tactics and strategies worthy of the complexity of our big data times!

Notes 1 Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2018). Numerous academic and non-academic publications have appeared on the question of ‘post-truth’, such as Julian Baggini, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World (London: Quercus, 2017); James Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017); Ilan Zvi Baron, How to Save Politics in a Post-Truth Era: Thinking through Difficult Times (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (London: Ebury Press, 2017); Evan Davis, Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It (London: Little, Brown, 2017); Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (New York/London: Routledge, 2020). 2 Hugo Ball, ‘Dada Fragments (1916–17)’, in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets. An Anthology (Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 51–4, here p. 51. 3 Hans Arp, ‘Notes from a Dada Diary (1932)’, in Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, 221–5, here p. 222.

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4 Arp, ‘Notes from a Dada Diary’, 222. 5 Jayson Harsin, ‘Post-truth populism: The French Anti-Gender Theory Movement and Cross-Cultural Similarities’, Communication, Culture and Critique 11:1 (2018): 35–52, here p. 45. 6 Lee McIntyre dedicates a full chapter in his book to the question, ‘Did postmodernism lead to post-truth?’, and mentions a wide range of literature on this topic (p. 192, nn. 35 and 36), e.g. Conor Lynch, ‘Trump’s War on Environment and Science Are Rooted in His Post-Truth Politics,’ Salon, 1 April 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/04/01/trumps-war-on-environment-andscience-are-rooted-in-his-post-truth-politics-and-maybe-in-postmodernphilosophy/; Andrew Calcutt, ‘The Truth about Post-Truth Politics,’ Newsweek, 21 November 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/truth-post-truthpolitics-donald-trump-liberals-tony -blair-523198; Andrew Jones, ‘Want to Better Understand “Post-Truth” Politics? Then Study Postmodernism’, Huffington Post, 11 November 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-jones/want-to-better-understand _b_13079632.html. In addition, McIntyre recommends the following blog posts: ‘Donald Trump and the Triumph of Right-Wing Postmodernism’, Stewedrabbit (blog), 12 December 2016, http://stewedrabbit.blogspot. com/2016/12/donald-trump-and -triumph-of-right-wing.html, and Charles Kurzman, ‘Rightwing Postmodernists’, 30 November 2014, http:// kurzman.unc.edu/rightwing-postmodernists/. 36; and Truman Chen, ‘Is Postmodernism to Blame for Post-Truth?’, Philosophytalk (blog), 17 February 2017, https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/postmo dernismblame-post-truth. 7 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Was ist Dada (1919)’, translated by Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 168. 8 Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, 5. 9 Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, 3. 10 See Leah Dickermann, ‘Introduction’, in Leah Dickerman et al., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC : DAP/The National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2005), 1–15, here p. 7. 11 Hanne Bergius, ‘Dada Berlin and its Aesthetic of Effect: Playing the Press’, in Harriett Watts and Stephen C. Foster, eds, Dada and the Press (New Haven: G. K. Hall, 2004), 67–91, here p. 67. 12 See Adrian Sudhalter, ‘Johannes Baader and the demise of Wilhelmine culture: architecture, Dada and social critique 1875–1920’, PhD thesis (New York Institute: New York, 2005), 238–9. 13 See Harriett Watts, ‘Dada and the Press: An Introduction’, in Watts and Foster, eds, Dada and the Press, 1–9, here p. 4. 14 See Watts, ‘Dada and the Press: An Introduction,’ 4. 15 Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto (1918)’, in Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, 76–82, here p. 77. 16 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Was wollte der Expressionismus’, in Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., Dada Almanach (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920), 38.

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17 Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann and Curtis Sullivan, ‘White lies: a racial history of the (post)truth’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15:2 (2018): 109–26, here p. 111. 18 Frakas and Schou, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy, 9. 19 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 20 Farkas and Schou, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy, 9 21 See, e.g., Jayson Harsin, ‘Post-Truth and Critical Communication Studies’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, published online https:// doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.757 (25.03.2021), here p. 13. Mejia et al., ‘White lies’, 114; and Christine Agius, Annika Bergman Rosamond and Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism: Masculinity, Climate Denial and Covid-19’, Politics, Religion & Ideology 21:4 (2020): 432–50, here p. 433. 22 Tom McCarthy, ‘What does Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death mean for the supreme court’, The Guardian, 19 September 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2020/sep/18/ruth-bader-ginsburg-supreme-court-faq-explainer (10.01.2022). 23 See Reuters Fact Check, ‘Fact Check-Claims Trump will be reinstated on August 13 stem from debunked conspiracy theories’, Reuters, 19 July 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-trump-reinstatedidUSL1N2OV1W3 (10.01.2022). 24 Sam Levine, ‘Democracy under attack: how Republicans led the effort to make it harder to vote’, The Guardian, 27 December 2021, https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/27/democracy-under-attack-trumprepublicans (10.01.2022). 25 Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy, ‘CNN Poll: Most Americans feel democracy is under attack in the US ’, CNN , 15 September 2021, https:// edition.cnn.com/2021/09/15/politics/cnn-poll-most-americans-democracyunder-attack/index.html (10.01.2022). 26 Cas Mudde, ‘Kyle Rittenhouse has walked free. Now it’s open season on protesters’, The Guardian, 19 November 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/commentisfree/2021/nov/19/kyle-rittenhouse-verdict-acquitted-protest (7.1.2022). 27 See, e.g., Ana Teixeira Pinto, ‘Artwashing – on NRx and the Alt-right’, Texte zur Kunst, 4 July 2017, https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/artwashing-webde/ (29.03.2021); Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies. The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2018). 28 See Christopher Wylie, MINDF*CK. Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World (London: Profile Books, 2020), 59. 29 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘ “I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool”: meet the data war whistleblower’, The Guardian, 18 March 2018 https://www. theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopherwylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump (29.03.2021).

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30 Agius et al., ‘Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism’, 440. 31 See Philip Manow, (Ent-)Demokratisierung der Demokratie. Ein Essay (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020); Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London/New York: Verso, 2018); Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017); Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 32 Colin Crouch, Post-democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 33 Farkas and Schou, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy, 126. 34 See Felix Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 14. 35 Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität, 10. The authors’ translation. 36 Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität, 98. The authors’ translation. 37 See, in this context, Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson, eds, Dada and Beyond, Volume 2: Dada and Its Legacies (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 38 For an overview on post-digital discourse, see Kim Cascone, ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal 24:4 (2000): 12–18; Alessandro Ludovico, PostDigital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894, 2nd ed. (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2013); Florian Cramer, ‘What Is “Post-Digital”? in David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, eds, Postdigital Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 12–26. 39 See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 40 See Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 9. 41 See Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 17 ff. 42 Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 94. 43 See Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C. McGregor, ‘Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle’, Political Communication 35:2 (3 April 2018): 155–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2017.1364814. 44 See Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver and Sarah Frier, ‘How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda: Some of unit’s clients stifle opposition, stoke extremism’, Bloomberg.Com, 21 December 2017, https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-teamhelping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down (04.03.2021). 45 Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 677. 46 World Health Organization, ‘Infodemic’, blog, https://www.who.int/healthtopics/infodemic#tab=tab_1 (06.01.2022). 47 See, in this context, for example, Aoife Gallagher, Mackenzie Hart and Ciarán O’Conner, ‘III Advice: A Case Study in Facebook’s Failure to Tackle COVID-19 Disinformation’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2021, https:// www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Ill-Advice_v3.pdf. 48 ISD, ‘Between Conspiracy and Extremism: A Long Covid Threat? Introductory Paper’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2021, 4, https://www.isdglobal.org/

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wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Between-Conspiracy-and-Extremism_A-longCOVID-threat_Introductory-Paper.pdf. 49 See Marianna Spring and Mike Wendling, ‘How Covid-19 myths are merging with the QAnon conspiracy theory’, BBC News, 3 September 2020, https:// www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-53997203 (20.01.2022). 50 Chans first started to emerge in Asia, alongside other image boards such as 2chan, 4chan and 8chan. While the first boards were created for posting images and discussion related to anime, they quickly evolved to become hubs for the formation of internet memes and subcultures including hackers and political movements, such as Anonymous and the alt-right. For further reading, see, for example, Stephane J. Baele, Lewys Brace and Travis G. Coan, ‘Variations on a Theme? Comparing 4chan, 8kun, and Other chans’ Far-Right “/pol” Boards’, Perspectives on Terrorism 15:1 (2021): 65–80, https://www. jstor.org/stable/26984798. 51 See Kevin Roose, ‘What is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trumo Conspiracy Theory’, in The New York Times, 4 March 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/article/ what-is-qanon.html (20.01.2022). 52 In 2021, statistics showed that more than 1 in 3 Americans believed in QAnon content. See Mallory Newall, ‘More than 1 in 3 Americans believe a “deep state” is working to undermine Trump’, Ipsos, 30 December 2020, https://www.ipsos. com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-123020 (20.01.2022). 53 See Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko, Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon (Stanford: Redwood Press, 2021), 38–78. 54 ISD, ‘Between Conspiracy and Extremism: A Long Covid Threat? Introductory Paper’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2021, 5, https://www.isdglobal.org/ wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Between-Conspiracy-and-Extremism_A-longCOVID-threat_Introductory-Paper.pdf. 55 See Reed Berkowitz, ‘QAnon resembles the games I design. But for believers, there is no winning’, The Washington Post, 10 May 2021, https://www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-playsbelievers/2021/05/10/31d8ea46-928b-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html (20.01.2022). 56 See Chloe Colliver, MacKenzie Hart, Eisha Maharasingam-Shah and Daniel Maki, ‘Spin Cycle: Information Laundering on Facebook’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2020, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/12/spin-cycle_FINAL-1.pdf; Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019), 7. 57 For further reading, see, for example, Mark Littler und Benjamin Lee, Digital Extremisms: Readings in Violence, Radicalisation and Extremism in the Online Space (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Julia Ebner, Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Anne Aly et al., Violent Extremism Online: New Perspectives on Terrorism and the Internet (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 58 See Nahema Marchal, Lisa-Maria Neudert, Bence Kollanyi, Philip N. Howard and John Kelly, ‘Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption on

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Social Media During the 2018 US Midterm Elections’, Data Memo 2018, 5 (Oxford: Project on Computational Propaganda. comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk), 1–7, here p. 6. See Jakob Guhl, Julia Ebner and Jan Rau ‘The Online Ecosystem of the German Far-Right’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2020, https://www. isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ISD-The-Online-Ecosystem-of-theGerman-Far-Right-English-Draft-11.pdf; 59 See Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 178. 60 ISD, ‘Trans-Atlantic Journeys of Far-Right Narratives Through Online-Media Ecosystems’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2020, 7, https://www.isdglobal.org/ wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TransAtlanticJourneysofFar-RightNarratives_ v4.pdf; 61 See, e.g., Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (New York/London: Routledge, 2003); Howard-Woods, Christopher, Colin Laidley and Maryam Omidi, eds, #Charlottesville. White Supremacy, Populism, and Resistance (New York: Public Seminar Books, 2019); Carol Mason and Chip Berlet, ‘Swastikas in Cyberspace: How Hate Went Online’, in Chip Berlet, ed., Trumping Democracy in the United States: From Ronald Reagan to the Alt-Right (London: Routledge, 2018), 21–36; David A. Neiwert, Alt-America: The rise of the radical right in the age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017). 62 Dating back to the 1990s, research has been investigating the rise of far-right ideas online: see Maik Fielitz und Holger Marcks, Digitaler Faschismus: Die sozialen Medien als Motor des Rechtsextremismus (Berlin: Dudenverlag, 2020); Ralf Wiederer, Die virtuelle Vernetzung des internationalen Rechtsextremismus (Herbolzheim: Centaurus Verlag & Media, 2016); Kai Brinckmeier, Bewegung im Weltnetz: Rechtsextreme Kommunikation im Internet, new ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012); Andreas Bösche, Rechtsextremismus im Internet. Schattenseiten des www. (Hall: Berenkamp Verlag, 2001); Das Netz des Hasses: Rassistische, rechtsextreme und neonazistische Propaganda im Internet, (Vienna: Stiftung Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, 1997); Burkhard Schröder, Neonazis und Computernetze: wie Rechtsradikale neue Kommunikationsformen nutzen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995). 63 See Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, ‘The Fringe Insurgency. Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2017, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017_2.pdf. 64 For an overview on the encroachment of far-right ideas into the mainstream across Europe, see, for example, Karolin Schwarz, Hasskrieger: Der neue globale Rechtsextremismus (Freiburg: Verlag Herder GmbH, 2020); Maik Fielitz and Laura Lotte Laloire, eds, Trouble on the Far Right: National Strategies and Local Practices Challenging Europe (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017); Rainer Benthin, Auf dem Weg in die Mitte: Öffentlichkeitsstrategien der neuen Rechten (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2004). 65 See, for exemple, Heather Suzanne Woods, Make America meme again : the rhetoric of the alt-right, Bd. 45, Frontiers in political communication (New York: Peter Lang, 2019); Daniel Hornuff, Die Neue Rechte und ihr Design:

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Vom ästhetischen Angriff auf die offene Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019); Nagle, Kill All Normies. 66 See Nagle, Kill All Normies, 57. 67 See Thomas Wagner, Die Angstmacher: 1968 und die Neuen Rechten, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2017), especially 128ff.; Manuel Seitenbecher, Mahler, Maschke & Co.: Rechtes Denken in der 68er-Bewegung? (Paderborn: Schoeningh Ferdinand GmbH, 2013). 68 The title for this volume was inspired by the Athenian band Dada Data. According to our correspondence with one of the founding members, the group was founded in 1989 when the meaning of ‘data was still more vague’ (email exchange from 20 April 2017). Other projects to name in this context are the online platform http://www.dada-data.net/de/ and the self-published Dada Data by poet Jeff Bender (2012).

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PART ONE

From Dada to Data

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CHAPTER ONE

Dadadatadada: From Dada to Data and Back Again Mara-Johanna Kölmel

‘Data excites everything. Data knows everything. Data spits everything out . . . The ministry is overturned. By whom? By Data.’1 (Figure 1.1) Even among our data-driven surroundings, the 1921 ‘Dada Manifesto’, written by Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Breton and others, appears far ahead of its time. In our contemporary context, ‘Dada’ could be replaced with the word ‘data’. Did the Dadaists anticipate the first dataists? This speculative question guides this study of Dada data assemblages, investigating whether Dadaist abstraction, hacking and photomontage bear relevance in our big data economies and where these strategies are employed today. Exploring overlapping and decisively different territories of Dada poems and data poems (algorithms), this chapter focuses on algorithmically driven persuasion strategies on the far-right political spectrum that appear analogous to Dada’s own. It concludes by speculating how engaging Dadaist tactics can help foster critical vocabularies for confronting algorithmic power and big data. A cross-reading of Dadaist tactics and data-related thematics may then guide ‘our vulgar minds to ideas and things which none of the originators had thought of’, in the words of Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck.2 The approach certainly necessitates moments of abstraction but, per theorist McKenzie Wark, this may also entail a revelatory potential: ‘To abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations.’3 Do the terrains of Dada and data entwine? 23

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FIGURE 1.1 Tristan Tzara, DADA soulève tout, 1921. Text by the artist (recto). Letterpress, sheet: 10 13/16 × 8 1/4’ (27.4 × 21 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. Acc. no.: 3216.2008, © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, Christophe Tzara.

What might they learn from each other? By aligning Dada and data-driven politics, the goal is to generate openings for thinking about this present moment and the challenges it poses in imaginative and unprecedented ways. Raoul Hausmann’s sound poem, Sound-Rel, 1919 (Figure 1.2), is assembled from syllabic or pre-linguistic fragments, numbers and signs whose semantic content moves towards pure sound. Letters are playfully arranged across the page form curious structures and units. The poem reads in different directions like its stanzas were spilled, inviting readers to engage with its characters’

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FIGURE 1.2 Raoul Hausmann, Sound-Rel, 1919. Sound poem, coll. Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, château de Rochechouart. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021.

choreographies. Instead of employing language’s communicative potential, Hausmann’s poem consciously foregrounds the voice materially, sharing the avant-garde dream of abstraction expressed in early-twentieth-century painting, sculpture, music and poetry. Abstraction seemed to be the appropriate response to the unspeakable events and images accompanying World War I. On 28 June 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Habsburg heir Franz Ferdinand, provoking a chain of military audacities and defensive leagues to a war beyond any common sense, moral grounds or national interest. The four-year event shifted battle coordinates and ushered in the

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painful and deadly passage from the nineteenth century. Myriad military innovations ranging from tanks, poison gas, tracer bullets, pilotless drones and aerial surveillance photography made killing more efficient, systematic and pervasive than ever. World War I claimed 40 million military and civilian casualties. Art’s potential erupted and sought freedom from tradition, progress, ideals or any predetermined content. Artistic modes necessarily ventured towards abstraction. Freed from meaning, Hausmann’s 1919 poem initiated a novel language capturing language’s failure in war’s lived reality. His and his peers’ sound poetry of noise, its squeaks and shrieks, represented the background – the inarticulate, the disastrous, the decisive and expressive. The [sound poetry] tried to elucidate the fact that man is swallowed up by the mechanistic process. In a typically compressed way it shows the conflict of the vox humana [human voice] with a world that threatens, ensnares, and destroys it, a world whose rhythm and noise are ineluctable.4 Dadaist Hugo Ball suggested this was the sound reel of war and its aftermath. Many World War I intellectuals lost confidence in the ‘rhetoric – if not principles – of the culture of rationality’ prevalent in Europe since the Enlightenment.5 It paved the way for authoritarian politics to exacerbate mass death, genocide and warfare. Dada’s raucous backdrop is marked by war, aggression, nationalism and rising fascism.

Data poems Hausmann’s phonetic creations strangely resemble what can be called a ‘data poem’ – or rather, an algorithm (Figure 1.3). ‘What matters in our data economy,’ argues Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, ‘is the quality of the algorithms that crunch data and the talent a firm has hired to develop them. Google’s success is about “recipes, not ingredients”.’6 As data’s structuring force, algorithms, not unlike Dada poems, vary in complexity. Both have the character of recipes which, as Peter Bürger observes of Dada poems, are ‘to be taken quite literally as suggesting a possible activity on the part of the recipient’.7 They can be understood as instructions that range from the most simple set of rules described in natural language to the most complex formulas involving all kinds of variables. If one reads the source code of a genetic algorithm out loud, it bears striking resemblance to an abstract Dada sound poem. Andrew Goffrey points out that an algorithm is ‘an abstraction having an autonomous existence independent of what computer scientists like to refer to as “implementation details”, that is, its embodiment in a particular programming language for a particular machine architecture’.8 With the substantial growth of data sets, contemporary algorithms are increasingly confronted with a growing entropy in the flow of data that is ‘big data’.9 According to Luciana Parisi, ‘infinite amounts of information . . . interfere

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FIGURE 1.3 Grayson Earle, Binary view of the Bail Bloc mining algorithm – a software that mines cryptocurrency which is then traded for US dollars to bail low income people out of US jails, 2021. © Grayson Earle. with and . . . re-program algorithmic procedures’ and thus produce alien and abstract rules.10 They are freed from merely executing instructions and become ‘performing entities’.11 Algorithms no longer guarantee data’s organizing force – ‘the infallible execution of automated order and control’ – and instead evince a ‘new level of determination that has come to characterize automated modes of organization and control’.12 Algorithms and Dada poems operate autonomously and abstractly, yet they could not be any more different.

Dada data hacks A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes, be they ruling or ruled, revere it – yet fear it. Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed.13

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This excerpt is not one of Dada’s many manifestos dedicated to an avantgardist programme but rather text from McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto, written sixty-eight years after Hausmann created his sound poem. Unfolding between the coordinates of labour, property and power, Wark’s book updates Marxist thought for the globalized internet age. Written in manifesto style, it is a revolt against how ‘abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property’ – information’s commodification by what she calls the ‘vectoralist class’.14 Redrawing the battle lines of property, labour and power, Wark argues that the dynamics of class have shifted. The antagonism was not to be located between capitalists and proletarians, but rather between hackers and vectoralists, the ruling class seeking to appropriate and commodify information.15 In her writing, she encodes the utopian promise of an alternative shared information commons realized by the new progressive hacker class. Wark aligns abstraction with hacking, a term with roots in West Germanic that is related to the German verb hacken, describing precisely what Dadaists like Hausmann did with fragmented, cut and repeatedly blown words, sounds and images to produce new meaning. Hacken, or cutting, is an ‘epistemological tool’ for revealing the social pathology and contradicting physiognomy of Dada’s epoch, best conveyed in photomontage.16 It consists of torn, pasted or hacked photographs and photographic reproductions encountered in popular culture and media. By juxtaposing elements side by side instead of hierarchically, the photomontage maps power relationships in its arrangement. It manifests itself in an incomplete ever-changing imponderable event, instead of retaining a seemingly universal truth. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (Figure 1.4) scrutinizes cross-sections of Dada’s internal reality. Moving between fiction and reality, profane and the sublime, Höch’s photomontage complexly entangles subjects and objects in fictions and facts, as well as in the profane and sublime, of their sociopolitical reality. The work compromises fragments haphazardly arranged into a technoid-human ecology. Höch’s vivid ecosystem contains human heads, busts and at times full-body shots of historical and political figures clashing with a landscape of crane parts, excavator buckets, ball bearings, cogs, wheels and other machines. The centre of the work is marked by a headless ballerina elegantly juggling the head of the artist Käthe Kollwitz. She is surrounded by prominent figures such as Albert Einstein, Emperor Wilhelm II, General Hindenburg, and the first chancellor of the Weimar Republic Friedrich Ebert. They appear in the top register of the collage. These influential figures are caricatured as composite beings, at times fused with female bodies or mechanical parts. The beings are juxtaposed with personalities representing the cultural life of the Wilhelmina era, including the director of the Berlin theatre Max Reinhardt, poet Theodor Däublin, Kurt Hiller, and Käthe Kollwitz. The

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FIGURE 1.4 Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, 1919. Collage, 114 × 90 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 / Photo: © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders.

partial portraits in the Dada circle of Raoul Hausmann, Walter Mehring, George Grosz, John Heartfield and the artist herself populate Höch’s cosmos. They are placed with unknown figures in different shapes and sizes that appear as recognizable individuals. Höch’s world is also inhabited by animals from elephants to insects, street views, American skyscrapers and

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other buildings, and automobiles. Words, sentences and Dadaistic statements appear between human and non-human actors along a European map indexing women’s voting rights. Disparate levels, alternating perspectives, differing proportions, floating individual parts and caricatured personalities create a pictorial world dissolved in all directions. The work highlights culture and politics of the unsettled urban environment in Germany after World War I, such as the Kiel mutiny of 1918 that triggered the revolution that ended the German empire, or the repression of the communist Spartacus revolt in January 1919. Alongside figures, machines and texts, modern life is dispersed dynamically. Höch creates a multilayered anti-hierarchical web of relationships; society becomes a body of ramifying and isolating functions and meanings that emerge from the process once again as living Gesamtkunstwerk.17 As Patrizia McBride remarks on the title of the collage, ‘its operations of cutting and pasting are tantamount to slashing the present open and subjecting its form to a ruthless mix-and-match that does not refrain from violating putatively intact existence by means of grotesque juxtapositions and the radical manipulation of scale’.18 Höch unmasks the matrix of antagonism and authoritarianism hiding ‘behind Germany’s new republican facade while at the same time issuing an appeal to join forces with DADA in seizing the emancipatory opportunities opened by popular culture and mass society’.19 The link between contemporary hacking and Dada as a means to open new possibilities and produce alternative visions, too, is emphasized in Wark’s Hacker Manifesto. ‘To hack is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds, beyond necessity20 . . . In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.’21 Wark briefly references Dada as a bridge and example for freeing the creative information commons from authorship and private property relations.22 She works with abstraction and hacking, not unlike Hausmann and Höch, namely as tools and strategies for coming to terms with her present: ‘The production of new abstraction always takes place among those set apart by the act of hacking.’23 If Hausmann applied abstraction to highlight language’s materiality, then Wark does the same to information. She applies Dadaist strategies such as abstraction and hacking to subvert power in the virtual sphere and digital forms. A decade before mainstream media caught on, Wark identified the distinct of form and materiality in capitalist accumulation currently revolutionizing big data.

Big Dada data politics ‘The ministry is overturned. By whom? By Data.’24 According to former Cambridge Analytica (CA) CEO Alexander Nix, data is the ‘new oil’ of the

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digital era which is being commodified as an ‘arms race’ to profit without precedence.25 In the Wild West of the world wide web, big data companies such as CA obtain behavioural data with models precisely picturing people for tailored products – at times, entire political campaigns. In detailed accounts of former CA employee Brittany Kaiser, the Dadaist prospect is a bitter reality. Kaiser highlights CA and its mother company SCL Group’s strategic use of data to influence and even overturn existing ministries for their clients globally. CA’s database featured among others between two thousand and five thousand individual data points of 240 million Americans.26 The data was bought from different big data vendors, was then matched to the people’s political information such as voting habits, and then again to their Facebook data.27 Through the so-called Friends API, Facebook allowed third-party apps access to their users’ data and often their friends’ data, too, without their awareness. CA went further with psychographics and developed an analytical, databased tool to assess personalities and motivations for teams of creatives tailoring specific messaging to different types of targets.28 Behavioural micro-targeting from video to audio and print reaches repeatedly until engagement is achieved. CA mainly used this on ‘persuadables’ and ‘deterrence’ groups, swing voters who could still be convinced to vote for their clients or at least not go to the polls to vote for the opponent. Though organizers have denied the use of psychographics in Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign and the UK Vote Leave campaign, records show otherwise.29 Through ‘brand lift studies’, the CA team ‘could achieve an 11.3 percent favourability for Trump with an online audience of 147,000 people, and an 8.3 percent increase among them in intention to vote for Trump’ through specifically tailored messaging.30 While CA shut down operations in 2018 in the aftermath of the Facebook-CA scandal, its obscure network and companies relating to it still exist. As Meredith Hoy highlights in this volume alligning data-driven strategies is tempting, given their uses of recipes and procedures, but the two remain different. A Dadaist procedure is first and foremost an open-ended process that is based on artistic freedom and chance. An algorithm processes data and predicts habits to target selected content mandates with certain instructions for precise executions. Data logic is always already strategically related to an output or rather a use value. One may, however, ask whether the power of predictive algorithms and data modelling has contributed to Western political landscapes looking closer to those experienced by the Dada movement. The following will cast more light on data-driven strategies of persuasion on the far-right political spectrum that appear to have Dadaist analogies. Galvanized by economic downturn, financial insecurity, social distancing, patriotic populism and white nationalism, far-right extremism continues to rise.31 Worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, numerous studies observe the mainstreaming of far-right ideologies.32 Far-right groups work together in coordinated grassroots activities enabling diverse but globally connected

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goals such as ‘[influencing] elections, [attracting] worldwide media attention and [intimidating] political opponents’.33 They have successfully adapted new technologies including automated influence operations such as bots and predictive algorithms in order to weaponize social media.34 The groups make fringe ideologies of disinformation, hate and distorted or polarizing content mainstream.35 To this end, right-wing communities pair aesthetic or image-based strategies with algorithmically driven tactics facilitated by social media architecture.36 Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies is one of the first deeply researched studies about the online sub/net-cultures of the organized and global altright movement.37 In relation to the American alt-right, the author observes that their mobilization is mainly one based on aesthetic and cultural means, by influencing culture using media.38 This approach carefully targets the boundaries of the speakable and the unspeakable.39 European groups on the far-right spectrum consciously share aesthetic approaches to augment cultural hegemony.40 Their malice strategies are based on transgression and subversion and are targeted at intervening into politics with aesthetic and visually powerful provocations.41 They fight what they call ‘information wars’ with memes, videos, aesthetic interventions, symbolic attacks and vocabularies undermining the establishment.

Mean memes Cut-and-paste-style photographic montages or memes return as the subject of highly targeted and data-driven online strategies in polarized media ecologies. Forms and styles become politically motivated instruments for enhancing or penalizing public images of politicians and manipulating influences of online publics. Not unlike the Dadaist photographic montages embedded in material conditions needing illumination, the meme is a tool for inserting a political opinion on ‘the mass press in the mass press’ with highly visual tactics of sabotage and subversion.42 In online cultures, memes are important sites of culture and community creation. Memes made of static images, videos and clichés share common underlying themes and mimetically transmit information and ideas.43 Their aesthetic is easily consumable, highly persuasive and can be appropriated, endlessly copied and deployed for new audiences virally. Politically motivated montages can leave the humorous and ironic to transmit racist, misogynist, homophobic, aggressive and hateful undertones. They organize and agonize hidden extremist intentions to make them more palpable for normalizing, generating and solidifying an audience’s devotion to extremist ideas. In forums and image boards such as 4chan, /pol/ and Reddit, users have called Donald Trump’s election ‘meme magic’, insinuating that memeing him into the White House with their tactical ‘memetic warfare’ has altered mainstream culture and politics offline.44

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In a meme posted by a prominent British alt-right supporter, the representation of Jewish billionaire George Soros appears inspired by historical anti-Semitic caricatures, positioned as the representative of collective forces (Figure 1.5). He embodies the archetype of Jewish hatred, the n(m)emesis of the alt-right. His individual features are as unrecognizable as those of the other collectives depicted. They are the addressees of hatred, the embodiment of all that the right wing despises: Jews, Black people, Muslims, women, politicians, authorities, the media and intellectuals. Hatred and violence are choreographed in an aesthetic form with a vertical axis of vision targeted against ‘the other’ who oppresses and threatens one’s own. ‘Up there’ Soros is the fantasized, dangerous and suppressive power. The mistreatment of his followers is indicated by the police’s action – valorized as an excusable but necessary measure. The other can be denounced, disregarded, injured or killed. Anti-Semitism represented through visual means creates an atmosphere of segregation.45 Nagle opines that ‘the alt-right today could never have had any connection to the

FIGURE 1.5 Anonymous, George Soros Meme, 2016. shorturl.at/eistQ, accessed 18 January 2022.

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mainstream’ without ‘the image- and humour-based culture of the irreverent meme factory 4chan and later 8chan that gave the alt-right its youthful energy, with its transgression and hacker tactics’.46 But are alt-right photomontages using transgressive means and hacker tactics indeed comparable to those employing Dadaist approaches?

Dada data tactics The Dadaists created compositions through montage, abstraction, collage, transgressive humour or incorporated elements of chance and forms of automatism over organizing around a consistent style.47 For Leah Dickerman, this ‘points to one of its primary revolutions – the reconceptualization of artistic practice as a form of tactics. The last word with all of its military connotations is helpful. It suggests a form of historical mimicry, a movement from the battlefield to the cultural sphere, in which art is imagined in a quasi-military way.’48 Looking at the meme wars today, does history return as a reversed constellation? Has the alt-right co-opted the left’s ideological tools? Today the photomontage reappears and infiltrates the public sphere as a hallucinatory, deceptive, highly manipulative, hate-fuelling ‘rhetorical tool’.49 Compared to Dada’s machinic cutting, pasting and slicing through states of affairs with violent visibility, today’s memes, however, appear more like an organic amalgamate, an endlessly reconfigurable ‘traceless adduction from its source’.50 If photomontage openly conveyed the effects of wartime shock, violence and agitation of modern life and industrial capitalism with its cuts, tears, seams and fissures, then ‘mean’ alt-right memes amplify the violence and agitation of a post-industrial Photoshop society. Often hidden behind a layer of ambiguous or offensive humour, their messages convey a singular meaning – a meaning that can be taken ironically or seriously but one that remains the same. Dadaist photomontages such as Höch’s, in contrast, are endlessly dialogical and plural allowing a multitude of possible interpretations. While Höch’s dazzling process orchestrated perceptions unconfined to singular plotting, memetic warfare of the alt-right choreographs a lucid, hate-fostering singularity. It generates a phantasmagoria of alternative facts. While Dada rethought collage to resist nationalism, data-driven alt-right memes make and mark it the centre of white supremacy, exclusionary politics and radicalized views. Carolin Emcke reminds us that dealing with right-wing hatred necessitates not answering the essentialism of their tactics with essentialist insinuations.51 Instead of reciprocating their demonization, the objections should be directed at the structural conditions of hatred and disregard.52 Identifying the sources that feed hatred, its structural possibilities and the mechanisms they obey helps to subtly subvert them. If the Dadaists embedded their massmedia critiques in the mass media, then an effective critique of right-wing

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hatred needs to be equally addressed and imbedded. Digital infrastructures must not only resist racial violence in content but also in form, perhaps even by experimenting with its own dialectics. Formal resistance requires a sharpened interest in forms. Sabine Kriebel suggests montages of resistance cannot be a mere ‘surface phenomenon . . . but needs to reveal something more profound about its systems of operation’.53 They need to target and understand audiences and distribution systems because ‘the digital world works in terms of attention, sensation, staying power, systems or proliferation and production and data archiving’.54 How can engaging Dadaist strategies of abstraction, hacking and montage tactically help develop critical vocabularies for confronting post-truth politics?

Conclusion Dada’s international network of itinerant practitioners defined a humorous yet radical political mode of intervention. Their approaches did not cohere in a particular style but rather as a set of strategies, thereby conceptualizing artistic practice as a form of tactics.55 Compared to the alt-right’s algorithmically driven ‘aesthetic interventions’, Dada’s approaches did not replay reactionary, racist and exclusionary social forms by progressivelooking means. By extensive humour, photomontage, hacking and abstraction, Höch, Hausmann and other Dadaists created artistic worlds enabling alternative perspectives and disparate levels of perceiving. They destabilized the status quo by marking the need for a new language and for open and peaceful dialogues with conceptual creativity and vision, such as in Hausmann’s Sound-Rel. Höch’s collages also probed diverse agents with manifold, contradictory characteristics and inclinations coexisting hierarchically. Her aesthetics anticipate a free society of plural yet contiguous identities. She defends singular identity over universal or supremacist identity. Dada’s tenderness requires careful and precise observations of differentiations that individuate people. Hateful messages propelling alt-right memes in comparison are inaccurate and imprecise.56 They adjust the object of hatred to target their demands against ‘those up there’ or ‘those down there’. As shown by researchers such as Daniel or Nagle, the design strategies of the New Right or alt light are directly tied to violent, far-right-wing extremism. Underground preparations aesthetically echo on the social surface of New Right groups swamped from fringe communities into the mainstream.57 Hate is elemental along with fear, aggression and destruction. Invitations to be transformed by it must be rejected. Haters allow themselves to be deformed by other haters, and therefore hate can only be countered affirmatively. Online haters lack what Dadaists like Höch or Hausmann possessed: close observation, modest curiosity and tolerance for coexistence with self-irony and doubt. Their photomontages and abstractions slice reality open to carefully examine and

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deconstruct its anatomy. Höch and Hausmann identified the figures fostering hate and related them to their ideological preconditions. They referenced the atrocities of World War I and not only revealed a nexus of aggression and hate but also humour and love. Their artistic and at times offensive forms were attached to a clear intellectual attitude. Dada’s image worlds were not disarticulated from their makers to hide true intentions in manipulation, cynicism and venom. Identifying hatred and violence structurally requires seeing the contexts that make them possible in the first place. Carefully examining the different sources and aesthetics feeding hate or violence counters popular myths of its naturalism, obviousness, or that hate is about authenticity over respect.58 If big data runs on ‘recipes, not ingredients’, hate also increasingly expresses, spreads and amplifies algorithmically.59 The threat and potential of social, economic and political reordering unfolds within the algorithm. Algorithms model visions of the social world in a knowledge apparatus enacting power, fear and hate. They run on sequences and processes orchestrating and reflecting contemporary conditions. Discourse about right-wing hatred in data-driven environments should therefore also address algorithmic power. One may then begin to compose algorithms differently, perhaps as agents of Dadaist imaginaries. As Hausmann reminded us one hundred years earlier, ‘Dada will only be given up when time becomes Dada.’60

Notes 1 Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Breton et al., ‘Dada Soulève Tout’, first published in The Little Review, VI 1:4 (January/March 1921). The piece was translated by Lucy R. Lippard, Dadas on Art, A Spectrum Book (Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice-Hall, 1971), 162–3. 2 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadism (1920)’, in Robert Motherwell and Jack D. Flam, eds, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1989), 31. 3 McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004), 8. 4 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, repr. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 57. 5 Leah Dickerman, ‘Introduction’, in Leah Dickerman et al., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (Washington, DC : DAP/ National Gallery of Art, 2005), 4. 6 Hal Varian quoted in ‘Data Is Giving Rise to a New Economy’, The Economist, 6 May 2017, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2017/05/06/ data-is-giving-rise-to-a-new-economy?giftId=ff4cd239-4181-47d8-9c5158ec00bdf257 (12.02.2021). 7 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53.

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8 Andrew Goffey, ‘Algorithm’, in Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2008), 15. 9 See Tiziana Terranova, ‘Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common’, EuroNomade (blog), 8 March 2014, http:// www.euronomade.info/?p=2268 (15.02.2021). 10 Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013), x. 11 Ibid., ix. 12 Ibid., ix–x. 13 Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, 1. 14 Ibid., 22. 15 Melissa Gregg, ‘Courting Vectoralists: An Interview with McKenzie Wark on the 10-Year Anniversary of “A Hacker Manifesto”,’ Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 December 2013, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/courtingvectoralists-interview-mckenzie-wark-10-year-anniversary-hacker-manifesto (12.02.2021). 16 Patrizia McBride, ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Visualizing Politics in Berlin Dada’, in Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto, eds, Art and Resistance in Germany (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), 26. 17 Hanne Bergius, Montage und Metamechanik : Dada Berlin – Artistik von Polaritäten, Schriftenreihe (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2000), 130. 18 McBride, ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife’, 30. 19 Ibid., 23. 20 Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, 14. 21 Ibid., 4. 22 Ibid., 199. 23 Ibid., 211 (see footnote). 24 Tzara et al., ‘Dada Soulève Tout’, 162–3. 25 Alexander Nix, quoted in Brittany Kaiser, Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again (New York: Harper, 2019), 12. 26 Ibid., 78. 27 Ibid. 28 Using the OCEAN behavioural scoring, CA could match individuals’ character traits with already existing data points. It is through this approach that CA could determine whether someone was open, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic. After segmenting people in their database, one could match them again with information they had given about themselves based on Facebook likes, their voting data, shopping habit, credit scores. This together with the accuracy of predictive algorithms, CA produced scores of every person in America and determined their voting probability on a scale from 0 to 100. These algorithms were then also used to track voters’ online behaviour, e.g. where they spend most of their time and were therefore reachable; see Kaiser, Targeted, 84–5.

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29 Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, ‘Bold Promises Fade to Doubts for a Trump-Linked Data Firm’, The New York Times, 6 March 2017, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-analytica.html; Mary-Ann Russon, ‘Political Revolution: How Big Data Won the US Presidency for Donald Trump’, International Business Times, 20 January 2017, http://www.ibtimes. co.uk/political-revolution-how-big-data-won-us-presidency-donaldtrump-1602269; Grassegger and Krogerus, ‘The Data That Turned the World Upside Down’; Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Revealed: How US Billionaire Helped to Back Brexit’, The Guardian, 25 February 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit; 30 Kaiser, Targeted, 229. 31 According to Mudde’s definition, right-wing extremist movements are characterized by a combination of at least three of the following five features: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and strong state advocacy; see Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 178. 32 For a differentiated definition of different right-wing ideologies, see the Introduction to this volume. 33 Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, ‘The Fringe Insurgency. Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2017, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017_2.pdf. 34 See Heather Suzanne Woods and Leslie A. Hahner, Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right, Frontiers in Political Communication Vol. 45 (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 145; Ute Schaeffer, Fake statt Fakt: Wie Populisten, Bots und Trolle unsere Demokratie angreifen (Munich: dtv Verlagsgesellschaft, 2018), 283. 35 For an overview on recent studies, see ISD, ‘Trans-Atlantic Journeys of Far-Right Narratives Through Online-Media Ecosystems’, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2020, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/12/TransAtlanticJourneysofFar-RightNarratives_v4.pdf; Patrick Hermansson et al., The International Alt-Right. Fascism for the 21st Century?, Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Annett Heft et al., ‘Toward a transnational information ecology on the right? Hyperlink networking among right-wing digital news sites in Europe and the United States’, International Journal of Press/Politics, 2020, https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1940161220963670; R. Faris et al., ‘Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 US presidential election’, Berkman Klein Center, 16 August 2017, https:// cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud; Institut Montaigne, ‘Media polarization “à la française”?: comparing the French and American ecosystems’, May 2019, https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/publications/ media-polarization-la-francaise; ADL , ‘Hate Beyond Borders: The Internationalization of White Supremacy’, Anti-Defamation League, 2019, https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/hate-beyond-borders-theinternationalization-of-white-supremacy; Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, Post-digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018).

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36 YouTube’s recommended videos can propel users into an immersive bubble of right-wing extremism: see Derek O’Callaghan et al., ‘Down the (White) Rabbit Hole: The Extreme Right and Online Recommender Systems’, Social Science Computer Review 33:4 (1 August 2015): 459–78, https://doi. org/10.1177/0894439314555329. Twitter’s ‘Who To Follow’ suggests violent extremist content if the user already follows an affiliated group: see J. M. Berger, ‘Zero Degrees of al Qaeda’, Foreign Policy (blog), https://foreignpolicy. com/2013/08/14/zero-degrees-of-al-qaeda/ (01.03.2021). Simultaneous posting and mutual amplification activities can trick Twitter algorithms into prioritizing hashtags of extremist content: see Davey and Ebner, ‘The Fringe Insurgency. Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right’. 37 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2017). For a similar analysis in a German-speaking context, see Daniel Hornuff, Die Neue Rechte und ihr Design: Vom ästhetischen Angriff auf die offene Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019). 38 Angela Nagle, Die digitale Gegenrevolution: Online-Kulturkämpfe der Neuen Rechten von 4chan und Tumblr bis zur Alt-Right und Trump (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2018), 57. 39 Ibid. 40 This approach is inspired by Alain Benoist’s simplified reading of Gramsci. Benoist argues that effective strategies need to target the cultural field. One cannot overtake political power without taking over cultural power first: see Alain de Benoist, Kulturrevolution von rechts: Gramsci und die Nouvelle Droite (Krefeld: Sinus, 1985). 41 ‘Ich sehe die Aufgabe einer metapolitische, rechten Bewegung vor allem darin, den Provokations-, Subversions-, bildgewaltigen Aktivismus, die ästhetische Intervention zu stärken und zu steigern.’ Martin Sellner, Gewaltloser Widerstand – Martin Sellner Beim IfS, kanal schnellroda, 2017, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=3gjTgCAYwaA. Presentation as part of the 17th winter academy of the Institut für Staatspolitik. 42 Sabine Kriebel, ‘Montage As Meme: Learning from the Radical Avant-Gardes’, in Ascher Barnstone and Otto, eds, Art and Resistance in Germany, 141. 43 The idea of the meme originates from Richard Dawkins’s 1976 publication The Selfish Gene. The majority of the book centres on what he describes as ‘universal darwinism’. While all of biology is driven by genes, Dawkins argues culture is driven by memes. Floating around in the primeval soup of culture is information copied by imitation: see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 44 Ben Schreckinger, ‘World War Meme’, Politico Magazine, March/April 2017, https://politi.co/2qK8kHH (07.03.2021). 45 See Hornuff, Die Neue Rechte und ihr Design, 30. 46 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 13. 47 Dickerman, ‘Introduction’, 8. 48 Ibid., 8.

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49 Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again, 5. 50 Kriebel, ‘Montage As Meme’, 136. 51 Carolin Emcke, Gegen den Hass (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2016), 189–91. 52 See ibid. 53 Kriebel, ‘Montage As Meme’, 148. 54 Ibid., 149. 55 Dickerman, ‘Introduction’, 8. 56 See Emcke, Gegen den Hass, 12. 57 See Hornuff, Die Neue Rechte und ihr Design, 123. 58 See Emcke, Gegen den Hass, 19. 59 Hal Varian quoted in ‘Data Is Giving Rise to a New Economy’, The Economist, 6 May 2017, https://www.economist.com/briefing/2017/05/06/data-is-givingrise-to-a-new-economy?giftId=ff4cd239-4181-47d8-9c51-58ec00bdf257 (12.02.2021). 60 ‘Dada wird von uns aufgegeben werden, wenn die Zeit dada ist.’ See Raoul Hausmann, ‘Was ist Dada [1920]’, in Eva Züchner, ed., Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele: Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900–1933: unveröffentlichte Briefe, Texte, Dokumente aus den Künstler-Archiven der Berlinischen Galerie (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1998), 107.

CHAPTER TWO

Clouds, Critique & Contradiction: Programming Dissent in Dada and Data Art Meredith Hoy

In the first decades of the twentieth century, artists, intellectuals and dissidents struck up alliances under the banner of insolence and dissent. In small but enthusiastic battalions, the rebels charged, yelling at the tops of their lungs and brandishing makeshift weapons in mutinous revolt against war, cultural stagnation and the rising tide of totalitarian regimes. Their objective was clear: topple the false wall dividing art from life and break the cold silence of tradition. These battalions came to be known as the forces of the modern avant-garde. But what now, in this world of remote warfare, multiple-G wireless networks and mindless dependence on mobile computing devices? The avant-garde turned the machinery of culture against itself, repurposing tools and exposing infrastructure otherwise hidden by plaster walls and concrete facades. Now, in this contemporary life, in this twenty-first century, wrenching moments of acute visibility continuously fracture long-silenced histories of violence and trauma, sending shockwaves in every direction; on 26 May 2020, protests erupted one day after the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by four members of the Minneapolis Police Department. Footage from security cameras and cellphone videos recorded by bystanders showed Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, holding his knee on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. Floyd died of asphyxiation. On 20 April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of multiple charges and sentenced to twenty-two and a half 41

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years in prison. From the time of the murder to the present day, demands for justice for victims of police brutality continue to amplify, not only in the form of civil unrest, but across mass-media channels, the political arena, corporate marketing and national sports leagues. As monuments to the confederacy and statues of slave-owning cultural magnates were ripped to the ground by protesters in 2020, memorials and unattributed street installations began to map personal and collective histories of disenfranchised communities. Might we contend that this plethora of activity bears out the avant-garde’s mission to unify art and everyday life? As public insurgency becomes more widespread, can the dream of the avantgarde persist? Does art retain any power of protest? Has the modern avantgarde’s commitment to resistance, manifested by its rallying cries against war, fascism, totalitarianism, the bourgeoisie and capital, reached its end of days precisely because it is art? What of the valiant strikes against ideology and irruptions of radical, utopian narratives? What of shock? What of the new?1 The following pages do not chronicle the fateful demise of twentiethcentury avant-gardism at the hands of twenty-first-century cultural upheaval; rather, they investigate strategies of critical resistance and dissent in Dada and data art, and propose that these practices share a fundamental goal: to reveal that linear, teleological narratives foreclose and conceal by dissembling ‘truth’. Dadaist tactics of scrambling and shredding words, sentences, syntax and grammar resemble the ways in which data artists write glitches and randomness into software. Both illustrate that the symbolic structures and systems upon which we rely to safeguard our own sense of presence in the world are fragile, unstable and contingent. Far from advancing a nihilistic world view, however, Dada and data artists use their tools to tear away dead roots of complacency and banality and to cultivate profusions of surprise, uncertainty and curiosity. The repurposing of technologies against their intended use has been deployed in far more instances, extending much further back in history, than we see in the twentieth-century avant-garde (specifically, Dada) and twenty-first-century computational practices (specifically, data art). Nevertheless, they share significant correspondences and underlying motivations. Dadaists created noise by cutting words into phonemic sounds devoid of semiotic structure. Data artists create noise, of a different sort, by writing software that deconstructs digital pictures into fields of pixels or colour. Both Dada and data artists mobilize communication systems and technologies towards performative, self-reflexive critique. Both Dada and data artists aim to shake the pilings that support the narrow platform on which culture and knowledge industries balance tenuously. And finally, both Dada and data artists reveal the historicity and contingency of knowledge by tossing into the wind elemental components of languages, systems and truth claims.

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Dada: The sound of words; or, mind the gap! The story goes like this: Dadaists, in principle and in practice, stood out as the group of artists who most vociferously and most radically mobilized art towards the politics of dissent. They aimed to tear down the walls of art and leave them in a pile of rubble – no rebuilding, no sanctifying of the ruins for all time. Just rubble and rubbish: no more than that. The kingpin of Hugo Ball’s 1916 ‘Dada Manifesto’, performed on 14 July 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during his dada soirée, was the term ‘dada’ itself. Ball’s programme for the evening consisted of ‘reading poems that dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it’.2 To depose the regime of official language, Ball first pulled from his bag of tricks the tale, cited above, of Dada’s mysterious and multiple origins and its uncertain patrilineage. ‘Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means ‘hobby horse’. In German it means ‘good-bye’, ‘Get off my back’, ‘Be seeing you sometime’. In Romanian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right.’ And so forth.’3 Ball’s manifesto points to what will become central features of Dada; it revels in the porousness of sense: in ambiguity, mutability and indeterminacy. In his performance, Ball laid bare, in stark light, the dissolubility of language, words, sound and meaning. Ball’s dada soirée presages Dada’s reliance on and capitalization upon the slipperiness of meaning. The future of Dada lies in tracking unexpected intersections and plunging into unbridgeable gaps between what will be called signs and signifiers. Dada will instigate rebellion by catapulting at its enemies the sonorous thickness of the utterance. Performatively widening the gap between word and meaning by elongating vowels or dismembering speech into rhythmic utterances, Ball set a standard for ‘serious play’ in Dada practice.4 Tristan Tzara’s 1918 ‘Dada Manifesto’ stages a more violent attack on social systems; he does not stop at ‘serious play’ with language, instead spearheading a wholesale repudiation of instrumental logic, of the regulatory institutions that uphold this logic, and of the masses of human automata enslaved to those institutions and the knowledge systems that govern them: If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom, I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books.5 Railing against logic and knowledge, Tzara shouts from the rooftops: ‘Overturn rationalism and instrumentalism!’ ‘Expose the violence, corruption and militarism of so-called “ideals”!’ Tzara’s polemic sets its sights on the decadence of the bourgeoisie, their delusional adherence to

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outmoded traditions, and their blind trust in corrupt political systems and the knowledge industry. Having identified the ‘Enemy’, Tzara paves the way for Dada to assault art and its role in culture. For a group of (anti-)artists unified by nothing other than their distain of logic, post-Enlightenment aesthetics, corrupt politics and a market economy fed by the mindless self-indulgence of bourgeois consumers, attack was, finally, the most logical proposition to achieve their ends, or go down trying. The first stirrings of Dada were fomented by a bloodlust for rebellion and a specific goal to undermine the strict positionality and ideological rigidity that led to World War I. In the words of Hans Richter, a member of the Dadaist inner circle, ‘Dada was not an artistic movement in the accepted sense; it was a storm that broke over the world of art as the war did over the nations.’6 In his 1936 essay, ‘Artwork’, Walter Benjamin points to what he sees as an underlying contradiction in Dada’s attempts to dismantle art and culture. In rallying to destroy the weapons and tactics of war, they forged their own arsenal, revealing a thirst for annihilation equal (if opposite) to that of their stated enemy. In the essay, Benjamin draws parallels between Dada and the voracious drives towards speed, masculinist aggression, and the glorification of violence found in the Futurist manifestos, which ‘outline ideals that are dadaist in all but name’.7 Among their multiple strategies to impel social agitation, Dadaists carried out a series of ‘manifestations’, marauding against fine art and the bourgeois arbiters of good taste. Publicized as performances, these manifestations trampled theatricality as the ‘actors’ threw insults and provocations to incite the wrath of their audience.8 Like his Futurist predecessor Marinetti, Tzara intended in writing the 1918 manifesto to smash the traditions of Western art in totality, to desecrate the values, philosophies and aesthetics of both ‘classical’ and commodified, soporific art. The buck, however, stops there. Tzara castigates the grandiose, bombastic language and affectations of the Futurist manifestos. In his disavowal of Futurism, Tzara dices and scatters the unidirectionality of Marinetti’s aggression with a sharp, sly wit and self-critical bent that Peter Bürger, in his long-esteemed (and debated) treatise, The Theory of the Avant Garde, cites as the identifying marks of the avant-garde.9 Tzara’s composition of a manifesto against manifestos flaunts his taste (and flair) for irony and rhetorical subterfuge: ‘I write this manifesto and I want nothing, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.’10 Despite apparent similarities between Tzara’s and Marinetti’s zeal for destruction and rebellion, Futurism is not granted immunity from Tzara’s mandate against tradition. Futurism is the past. It is a knowable quantity and a delineated space. Any declaration of allegiance to Futurism would undermine a fundamental principle of Dada, which is, precisely, to contradict and overturn at every turn. ‘Dada invited, or rather defied, the world to misunderstand it, and fostered every kind of confusion. This was done from a principle of caprice and from a principle of contradiction.’11 Tzara acknowledges and embraces

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the paradoxical, recursive undecidability presented by his manifesto against manifestos. Using a manifesto to champion misdirection, contradiction and confusion threatens the logical and ideological underpinnings of Dada itself. But, at the same time, this threat turns back on itself: What is more illogical than writing a logical treatise against logic? What is better fun, for Tzara, than watching his own claims unravel in the process of proclaiming? In Tzara’s battle plan, ecstatic confusion replaces the confidence of largesse. As Bürger avers, the avant-gardes attempt to divest themselves of the trappings of institutionalized art in their pursuit of the ‘sublation of art’ and in their imperative to rouse social and political agitation in ‘everyday life’.12 However, recognition by the art world subsumes them into the very systems they fight against. Despite its radical ideals, Bürger contends that the avantgarde has ‘already become historical’.13 Consecrated and entombed in the mausoleum of history and the jailhouse of the museum, the work of the avantgarde, manifested in dissent on the streets is halted, turned to stone and filed under ‘Works of Art’.14 In this rather grim scenario, precedence contravenes against neo-avant-gardist aspirations to sociopolitical efficacy. Dada is clever, but not slick: led by conviction more than precision, its tactics and practices are diffuse and uneven. ‘Neo’ is not synonymous with newness. While shock and confusion belong to the new, irony and pastiche are the territory of the neo. From this perspective, a neo-avant-garde could never achieve the ‘protest value of the dadaist manifestations, even though [and I would argue, because] they may be prepared and executed more perfectly than the former’.15 This statement neatly illustrates Habermas’s concept of a ‘self-destruction of the critical capacity’, which meets its death at the hands of description; because description can never move beyond representation, self-critique (or self-reflexivity) can only ever be described (represented), but never be truly inhabited or achieved.16 Herein we see another strain of modern avant-garde utopianism. To be ‘in principle against principles’ is (as Tzara was, of course, aware) a counterfactual proposition – to stand against principles is to be principled. This is the word play embraced by Dadaists, who often delivered their stagey proclamations with a smirk and a wink. Ultimately, Dada, a purposefully inchoate, chaotic avant-garde movement founded upon both witty and deadly serious negation, is far less scattered or formless than it purported itself to be, going so far as to experiment, both implicitly and explicitly, with ‘procedure’ – what one might alternately call ‘programming’. It is often assumed that programming, coding, systems, algorithms and all varieties of procedural action are both reductive and constrictive. If this is indeed the case, Dada’s incorporation of procedure might controvert, or even doom to failure, its strategic deployment of confusion, misdirection and caprice. After all, if we are to believe Peter Bürger, the primary characteristic, or the birthright, of the avant-garde is its insistent and indefatigable self-criticism.17 However, criticality and reflection (reflexivity) are by no means obviated by coding, programming, algorithms or systems.

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Big data and the Angelus Novus; or, the end of history, again? In ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin describes Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus to allegorize and frame his theory of history. According to Benjamin, this image contests the notion that history is continuous, linear or, worse, inexorably and inherently progressive. The Angelus Novus pictures the historical past as a massive pile of debris that collects at the feet of the present moment. Although history is typically understood as a collection of past events, historiography implicitly looks ahead in accounting for the past. Historical inquiry is shot through with a concern with futurity; achievements will be made and measured by knowing, reifying and moving beyond the past. For Benjamin, however, the angel of history perceives not a logically ordered chain of events, but rather ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’.18 For Benjamin, as articulated through his allegory of the Angelus Novus, history is neither neatly ordered nor fully knowable. It does not give a shape to knowledge. Instead, it is composed of detritus, the exploded fragments of a past we can never fully reconstruct. Through the labour of unhinging code, software and interface from their intended use-value, contemporary data artists echo the Dadaist fervor for stripping language down to its elemental forms. In so doing, both stake claims against normativity, habitus and blind, post-Enlightnment adherence to formal structures and linear arguments. In the aftermath of Dada’s glossolalic phonetic vocalizations and stampedes in the public sphere, data artists generate decompositions of techno-cultural landscapes, images of digital decay that challenge the slickness of new channels and Photoshopped glamour. Without executable code, digital systems and electronic computers cannot generate information. Code seems alien to natural language – rigid and cold in comparison. However, Dadaists were also invested in the notion of language as a technology, if implicitly so. Language is code, code is language. Dadaists viewed culture as an encoded system. Phrases, idioms, sentences, as well as smaller units of letters, phonemes and words, can be construed as bits of data that are linked together in specific patterns to make meaning. The capacity to recognize a string of words as meaningful is a process of education and enculturation. I offer this sketch lest the thread is lost between data, language, and semiotics – and thus the analogical connection between Dadaists’ tactical use of language to destabilize bourgeois fantasies and data artists’ tactical use of code to break apart the phantasmagoric figuration of big data. As the tides of big data rise – too big, too much, too uncontrolled, too much to crunch – has the Angelus Novus, and the swirling pile of detritus that is history itself, diminished or collapsed into its own scrapheap? Does the

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expansion of data and data storage signify the ‘end of history’ – and, along with it, the end of the avant-garde and its valiant soldiers at arms? The Angelus Novus flies without a compass or any warning of what dragons lie ahead; his back turned towards the future, he sees only scraps of paper and ash. History is scattered, amorphous and senseless.19 But so, too, is big data a thing yet not a thing, an amorphous swarm that can only be conjured imaginatively. Personficiations notwithstanding, the information economy is fed a healthy diet by our own production of scientific, climatic, social, economic, political and personal data. In us, a swelling, persistent anxiety grows as our obsession with data tips into compulsion. ‘Clouds’, now bearing the names of corporate giants, have become multiple. For a small, but steadily rising, annual fee, Clouds are conveniently available to preserve and organize our data/ourselves. Data collapses into equivalence with both knowledge and self, our data becomes a mirror reflecting back to us the defining features of our humanity. On the one hand, we hoard data as if it is a guarantor of safety, stability, certainty and, most of all, self-recognition. But, on the other hand, a pervasive unease drives a narrative in which data takes on a disturbing vitality or, worse, a panoptic agency. This anxious narrative about replacement, supersession or ‘killing off’ of history by data threatens to reduce the history of the avant-garde to a computationally maintained archive of bits and bytes. If Peter Bürger is correct, Dada and its fellows meet their ultimate demise at the keystrokes of datafied bureaucracy: notarized, scanned, saved and lost in the glut of digitally stored information. This is a bit more than Dada bargained for.

The datalogical turn: Recipes, instructions, procedures; or, tips and tricks for a dynamite(d) data soufflé. (Aka the end. But also the beginning) In the mid-twentieth century, the invention of cybernetics and information theory precipitated what Patricia Clough et al. have termed the ‘datalogical turn’.20 Clough’s systems-theoretically derived hypothesis echoes the fundamental principles of cybernetics: that biological, mechanical, computational and other systems are comprised of data organized into informational patterns. Information theory, invented by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in the mid-1940s, postulates that the building blocks of communication (data) are configured into messages (information) and then transmitted and decoded between a transmitter and a receiver.21 The world and its operations, according to the paradigm initiated by these branches of thought, are effectively composed of data, information and information flow/exchange within and between systems.

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Information is the output of an organization of ‘nonsense’ (noise, data, alphabetical letters) into a ‘meaningful’ or ‘legible’ message. But, as capacities of computing devices to gather, generate and store data increase, the potential number of data sets, much less information-bearing messages, becomes too vast to control. Under these conditions, the possibility of stringing data into a chain of information becomes increasingly challenging. As the exponential accumulation of data rapidly exceeds the processing and storage capacities of the human mind, so, too, does the urgency to manage and encapsulate the unknowable with a convenient explanatory device. Enter the Cloud and big data, saviours of meaning in the face of system overload.

i. 2 cups data art, chopped Precipitated by the datalogical turn, cataclysmic upheavals in the knowledge industry – arts, humanities, social, biological and physical sciences, ecology, computing, etc. – fracture the structural integrity of disciplinary silos. As they begin to collapse, sorting through the rubble becomes (at best) a daunting and sweaty task. Perhaps, the best strategy is to gather this rubble, call it historical, and build communal living spaces alternatively named STEM or STEAM. Predictably, the building material for these new architectonics is data. Now, round the bend back to the twentieth-century avant-garde, and recall its dream of tearing down the velvet curtains of bourgeois indulgence to expose the horrors of war, totalitarianism and mass complicity. What features does that history share with the present, really, if our vision of the world has been altered so drastically by the vectors drawn by computers, data and whatever it is we mean when we say ‘new technology’? If, in a datafied techno-culture, critical thought or cultural production of any kind are deemed viable or valid only if verified by the data, what does Art ‘matter’? Is the self-criticality of a modernist avant-garde merely quaint in the face of these techno-tectonic quakes, or is it still worthwhile to find new tools or repurpose existing ones to data-mine the datalogical turn? Reductionism constricts (or chokes out) variability and imposes limitations on what is permitted in the arena of the knowledge industry and what counts as ‘meaningful’, ‘useful’ or ‘productive’ within that sphere. Reductivism narrows the methods and tools allowable in generating what can be deemed ‘true’. It seems a reasonable claim, then, that to guard against a datalogical monolith, art, among other discursive practices, should persist in rebellion, should stoke the fires of critique, and repurpose the mechanisms by which normative attitudes and behaviours are fostered and solidified. Despite the all-too-frequent ghettoization of data art and some branches of media art, is not the point of this ‘art thing’ to critically engage the cornerstones of contemporary life? In this case, would it not be data art that would have a chance against data-making technologies, representations of

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data, and the rhetorical, aesthetic and symbolic structures that preserve a datafied lifeworld? In his 2005 series Everything, All at Once, artist and programmer Jason Salavon demonstrates how art can behave critically in relation to information technology by not only (re)tooling but also, more accurately, by writing a new recipe for data-processing. In this series, Salavon filters each video frame of a cable television broadcast through a computational program, transforming broadcast signals in concentric, radiating bands of projected on a wall-sized screen. Salavon’s work affords a specific experience of the notional impossibility of a direct, unmediated link between sender, channel and receiver. The density, colouration and speed of the radiating circles is regulated by the signals transmitted in the television broadcast, rendering palpable the multiplicity of possible results when filtering data through different mediating devices. We see further notable instances of self-critique in several recent projects by artist Casey Reas, including Signal to Noise, KTTV (August 2015), Linear Perspective and All Your Face Are Belong to Us (Figure 2.1). In these remarkable pieces (also in series), Reas performs code-driven dissections of prominent, familiar mass-media channels. In the act of undercutting the oracular status of news, cable television and social media, Reas casts mass media as the influencer of all influencers, the shaper of thought, perception, action and interaction. Both Reas and Salavon not only comment on the surface representations of culture we see every day, but also, crucially, emphasize that the information we receive via mass media is built upon a substrate of data. For noise to become signal – or, for data to acquire meaning, it must be set in relation to other data. Chains of data create messages, or information, that convey meaning to a reader, viewer or user. The images that stream before us may seem direct, clear and immediate, but the message is nothing more than a transmission of data compiled into a chain of information. Reas’s reprocessing of data dismantles his source material, scrambling images and revealing slick technological messaging to be not so frictionless, after all. Reas’s series All Your Face Are Belong to Us presents a disturbing – or exhilarating, depending on one’s feelings about social media – view of the ways in which data increases in value as it achieves further invisibility. These works target issues of identity in an age when the custody of personhood seems to be governed by the largesse of one’s appearance on social media channels. In this series, Reas compresses profile pictures of five thousand of his Twitter followers, creating a sense of instability and change by continuously aggregating new ‘bits’ of different profile pictures into the compressed image. The viewer is faced with a version of everyday life in which identity is based on exteriority, and in which individual subjectivity is flattened into a (relatively) standardized platform. Using his own software, Reas splices and stitches a multitude of faces into a collective ‘self-portrait’. The results are hundreds of uncanny faces, each representing some combination of over one thousand backers. In tracking the dissolution and reformation of a sequence

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FIGURE 2.1 Casey Reas, All Your Face Are Belong to Us (Followers 1K), 2015. Code, digital images, computer, screen, 1080 × 1920 pixels. © Casey Reas.

of faces, a shade of modern, avant-garde fragmentation makes a cameo appearance. Reas’s self-critical application of computational technology loops back upon its intended utility in an attempt to tear down the complacent scrolling of the twenty-first-century masses, and, leading us back to a remixed version of Baudelaire’s modernity, to remind us that the world in the age of big data is still, and evermore, ephemeral, fugitive and contingent.

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ii. ¼ cup paper, diced In his 1917 composition entitled Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, Hans Arp dropped squares of paper in contrasting colours onto a larger paper surface, subsequently gluing the squares at their landingpoints. Arp’s goal was to subvert archaic notions of genius and virtuosity by eliminating artistic intention. Skill and craft could be left in the dust of the outmoded, uncritical bourgeois traditions to which they belonged. For Arp, chance offered a means of resistance by abrogating the subjectivity of the artist, and thus the fiction of genius.

iii. 1/3 cup language, 1/3 cup code, 1/3 cup software, melted In Sol LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, first published in the magazine Art-Language in 1969, we discover, or rediscover, a theory, methodology and aesthetics in which the work of art inheres in ‘instructions’ rather than (or more significantly than) its various material instantiations. In Sentence 5, LeWitt declares: ‘Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.’22 And in Sentence 11: ‘Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.’23 LeWitt’s pronouncement that the Idea is the Machine That Makes the Art, in tandem with Lucy Lippard’s art-critical identification of conceptual art with the dematerialization of the art object, have provided a framework for understanding discontinuous, widely ranging approaches to art practice.24 In the early years of the twenty-first century, theorists, artists, designers and programmers inaugurated a new practice labelled ‘software studies’, or, when specifically mobilized in an art context, ‘software art’. Within this highly inter- and trans-disciplinary group, many were (and continue to be) invested in the legacy of conceptual art in software, code and programming. Discussants of the genealogy of software art often link LeWitt’s instructions and software art; executable code bears resemblances to written instructions. A third term is less often noted: what Bürger calls Dadaist ‘recipes’. According to Bürger, ‘it is no accident that . . . Tzara’s instructions for the making of a Dadaist poem . . . have the character of “recipes”.’25 Dada, conceptual art and software art all highlight the possibilities inhering procedure and proceduralism. It might be tempting to align proceduralism with process, but upon consideration, the two are distinct. Process is openended, indeterminate, whereas procedure entails individuated steps. The outcome of procedure, however, is not predetermined; the end point will not remain the same in each iteration. After testing recipes and designing meals from my triad of cookbooks, I have found that one principle of cooking remains consistent. Regardless of

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my great care in adhering to instructions, the dish never tastes the same. Just as in cooking, Dada, conceptual art and data art underscore that procedure does not ensure repetition without difference. Chefs revel in irruptions of chance and unpredictability, in the astonishing, chaotic beauty of the glitch (which relies on system for its very existence), and in the slight (or not so slight) variances in flavour and texture potentiated by iteration. Proceduralism is, indeed, deeply imbricated in bureaucracy, militarization and other sinister institutions and practices, but in this instance, recipes, instructions for wall drawings and certain types of computational code-writing reveal generative possibilities latent in scrambling logic-machines, disrupting militarized sites and disregulating metrics of control-and-command.26

iv. Simmer until done, season to taste The appearance of traceable homologies between Dada, conceptual art and computational art suggests that, in fact, procedure is not synonymous with determinism and reductivism. Hugo Ball’s phonemic poetry smashes language’s tonal abstraction by scrambling words and speech. Culled from social media platforms, Reas’s portraits dissolve into lugubriously kaleidoscopic fragments. Words and the graphic representations of data are the systems that make the art. Ideology, bureaucracy, normativity are also the systems that fuel the making of the art, having been made invisible by dint of habitual patterns of seeing, hearing, thinking or acting. Inherently recombinatory and entropic, systems potentiate disruption. Arp’s act of dropping torn squares of blue paper onto a substrate and affixing them where they fell assayed the aesthetics of chance and hypothesized that chance is a system possessed of distinct aesthetic powers and properties.27 Chance and accident permeate every procedure; absurdity courses through every system, and we find ourselves not so distant from many of the principles so valued in ‘fine art’, such as ambiguity and indeterminacy. LeWitt’s statements transform ideas into art-making machines, programme a vector between logic and irrationality, and become the erstwhile manifesto of dematerialized art. Coincidentally, the seed of media art is germinated as screens are built into mainframe computers and computer graphics systems, governed by code, become the universal translators between human and machine languages.28 Uncannily, and inadvertently, LeWitt’s statements merge with computational processes. The art world refuses to acknowledge this unholy alliance between human and machine. Anger and uproar ensue – this cannot be art! And suddenly, at the end, where portraits diffuse into pixelated noise, where language is code, where systems are mined for the glitch, we are back where we started, with squares of paper, shards of language, and fragrantly simmering stews of confusion and noise:

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Input data: dada. Convert: text to bin numbers. Output: 01100100 01100001 01100100 01100001 da, da, dada, data

Notes 1 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 58. 2 Ibid. 3 Hugo Ball, ‘Dada Manifesto (1916)’. 4 The influence of Futurism on Dada is perhaps most evident in in Ball’s, and other Dadaists’, commitment to the use and misuse of language in their anti-establishment theories and practices. 5 Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto (1918)’, in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, 1951), 76. 6 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 9. 7 Naomi Joy Barker, ‘Parody and Provocation: “Parade” and the Dada Psyche’, RIdIM/RCMI Newsletter 21:1 (Spring 1996): 29–35, here p. 29. 8 The aggressive surges upon the performers by audience members has, oddly, brought to bear such terms as ‘participation’ and ‘collectivity’ in critical interpretations of these events. 9 ‘[W]ith the historical avant-garde movements, the social subsystem that is art enter the stage of self-criticism.’ See Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. 10 Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto (1918)’, 77. 11 Richter, Dada, 9 (my italics). 12 Ibid., 58. 13 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 57. 14 Robert Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’, in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 154–6. 15 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 57. 16 Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1990), 119. 17 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 22. 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257. 19 Is this a modernist, historical materialist remediation of the medieval icon, wherein the saint offers its blessing before a background of gold? Gold

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backgrounds, in medieval icon painting, paradoxically reflect the coexistence of iconoclasm (the glorious abstraction of the heavens) and the show of wealth in the tradition of patronage. 20 Patricia Ticineto Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber and Joshua R. Scannell, ‘The Datalogical Turn’, in Phillip Vannini, ed., Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research (New York: Routledge, 2015). 21 Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1949). 22 In her article on Sol LeWitt’s development of his series of incomplete open cubes, Rosalind Krauss invokes Beckett’s Molloy, in which the speaker performs a systematic bodily practice that pushes logical proceduralism to its point of rupture and ultimate unravelling. The speaker in Molloy in a compulsive manner transfers a succession of stones from one pocket to his mouth, where he sucks on each stone for an allotted period of time, and then to the other pocket. He continues removing a stone from the first pocket, sucking on it, and then placing it in the opposite pocket until there are no stones left in the original pocket and the process must be repeated in reverse. Krauss likens this activity to a minimalist and/or conceptual sculptural project that bears the look of a logical system, but ultimately reveals the systematized procedure to be an absurdly compulsive activity, with no evident goal outside the process itself. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘LeWitt in Progress’, October 6 (Autumn 1978): 46–60. 23 First published in 0–9 (New York, 1969), and Art-Language (England, May 1969). 24 Cf. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 25 Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 19. 26 Media scholar Johanna Drucker invokes the presumption that code=logic=control-and-command, and asks her readers to consider whether ‘the commonality of code storage as the defining condition of digital processing [is] a confirmation of a long-standing Western philosophical quest for mathesis (knowledge represented in mathematical form, with the assumption that it is an unambiguous representation of thought), in which there ceases to be any ambiguity between knowledge and its representation as a perfect, symbolic, logical mathematical form?’ See Johanna Drucker, ‘Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and Code Storage—or—Can Graphesis Challenge Mathesis?’, Leonardo 34:2 (2001): 141–5, here p. 141. 27 Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’, Artforum 7:1 (September 1968): 30–5. 28 In her meticulously researched and theorized monograph, Zabet Patterson examines the formative impact of early computer graphics on visuality, culture and the knowledge industry from the mid-twentieth century to the present. See Zabet Patterson, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2015).

CHAPTER THREE

The Legacy of the Berlin Dada Media Hoaxes in Contemporary Parafictive Acts Rebecca Smith

Parafictions have become an important mode of practice in contemporary art. For the purpose of this chapter, Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s definition is used, which defines a parafiction as ‘a fiction experienced as fact’. Lambert-Beatty developed the term and the parameters of her usage from a range of fields, beginning with Bruce Wilshire’s term ‘the paratheatrical’ and building upon theatre director Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘paratheatre’.1 Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows have worked on the concept of fictioning (c. 2010) both academically and with their collaborative contemporary art group, Plastique Fantastique (2004), to frame fictioning as a form of mythopoetic practice with their research culminating in the recent book Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy.2 The term ‘parafiction’ is employed here as all practices are experienced as ‘fact’ to some degree, functioning as hoaxes which work within existing structures of power rather than fictioning new ones. Tendency towards what satirist Stephen Colbert coined as ‘truthiness’ has blossomed alongside parafictions at the beginning of the twenty-first century.3 Donald Trump’s presidency encapsulates the rise of parafictive practices in online spaces, where, via his Twitter account, he has consistently proved his disregard for facts in the current age of so-called fake news.4 The legacy of the Berlin Dada media hoaxes in contemporary parafictive acts investigates the specific political context of the 1910s, and the 2000 and 2010s retrospectively, in relation to Claire Bishop’s concept of the ‘social turn’ while discussing the precedence of artistic parafictions evident in the provocative methods of audience alienation implemented in Futurists’ 55

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performance.5 The legacy of the Berlin Dada media hoaxes conducted by Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann, between 1917 and 1920, is then examined to demonstrate the correlations with contemporary parafictive acts. Baader’s personal situation afforded him the ability to enact these parafictions, with the duo’s practices including spoof announcements in newspapers and the Oberdada – a character adopted by Baader – standing as a candidate at the Reichstag and declaring the formation of the DadaRepublic of Berlin-Nikolassee. Contemporarily, UBERGMORGEN. COM’s principles of ‘hallucinated consensual hallucination’ and the Yes Men’s acts of identity correction and ‘laughtivism’ produce projects which lie between fact and fiction.6 These practices directly alter perceptions and, consequently, comment upon and make challenges to the current political situation in the West. Finally, the study demonstrates the legacy of parafictive acts, documenting their importance as effective strategies and tactics, which confront and expose the contemporary era of post-truth politics and technological infrastructure at a planetary scale.

Political context and social turns Politically, during both the 1910s and 2000s, it could be argued that in the West mistakes made by the elite have affected the many in favour of the few. In the 1910s, the elite used the working class as an expendable commodity in a war for their own gain. In the 2000s, the global financial crisis of 2008 saw those in power crash the economy, without taking responsibility for their actions or feeling the effects of the consequences. In both periods, this led to the rise of opposing ideologies in the West. Post-World War I, Germany fostered the growth of the right-wing Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP (Nazi Party) alongside the left-wing Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany, or KPD). In the first two decades of the 2000s, further fuelled by the 2008 global financial crisis, there has been a rise globally of populism, nationalism and the far-right.7 2016 epitomized this growth, as evidenced in the election of Trump as forty-fifth president of the USA, the British vote to leave the European Union, the growth of support for Marine Le Pen in France, and the election of far-right leader Sebastian Kurz in Austria. These events of 2016 occurred alongside the re-emergence of socialism and the left, with growing popularity for the policies of the Democrat Bernie Sanders in the USA, the British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the French Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Left Party.8 The Spanish General Election in April 2019 exemplifies these polarities as, although the socialist Partido Socialista y Obrero de España (Spanish Socialist and Workers Party, or PSOE) won the majority of seats, the far-right party Vox entered parliament with more than 10 per cent of the votes.9 In post-war Germany, the economy struggled to recover and to keep up with the vast reparations agreed in the Treaty of Versailles leading to

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hyperinflation, which mostly affected the working and lower middle class, as with the global financial crisis of 2008.10 The newly formed Weimar Republic was associated with weakness for accepting the loss of the war and terms of surrender. This, alongside constitutional weaknesses and proportional representation, meant that the progressive government was unable to make significant changes in Germany during their time in power, ultimately leading to the rise of the Nazis. Here disillusionment with politics fostered nationalism. Similarly in the first two decades of the 2000s, events such as the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and global financial crisis in 2008 have led to a distrust of politicians and fall in engagement with politics and democracy.11 Social activist and author Naomi Klein dubbed 2003 ‘the year of the fake’, the number one fake being the invasion of Iraq to conduct a hunt for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.12 These periods of political unrest and social change lead to, as Bishop suggests, a ‘social turn’ occurring in art whereby practitioners produce socially engaged practice.13 According to Bishop, historically these turns have occurred three times.14 First, with the historic avant-garde in 1917 in Europe; secondly, with the so-called ‘neo’ avant-garde leading up to 1968; and most recently after the fall of communism in 1989. Bishop is specifically discussing participatory art, whereas this chapter concentrates upon online spaces. Therefore, the ‘social turn’ argument is extended to imply that the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, combined with the third social turn, opened up the possibility for parafictions to flourish in virtual spaces. While actual, metaphorical and symbolic walls were broken down, the new seemingly unseen boundaries of the virtual led to potential gaps in perception and the conditions for the parafictional to thrive. Within the first social turn, Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began to utilize the possibilities of unrest and uncertainty, using them as a method to change artistic practice and showcase his modernist ideas. Marinetti sought to employ provocative methods of audience alienation in his performances, as RoseLee Goldberg reinforces: ‘Performance was the surest means of disrupting a complacent public.’15 Marinetti implemented many strategies of audience alienation including booking theatres twice over and covering the seats in glue.16 These acts ensured that the audience was engaged with Marinetti’s ideas and disruption to the everyday was achieved. Audiences often reacted negatively to the performances, throwing fruit and vegetables to demonstrate their disgust. The use of disruption led to the arrest and conviction of the performers, which gave the Futurists the free publicity they desired and exposed their work to a wider audience by harnessing the potential of the rapidly growing print media. The exploitations and explorations of theatre by the Futurists opened up the possibilities of confronting the everyday, unseating the complacency of the public. These performances were an attempt to mobilize the people against their current political uncertainty by altering their experience. Johannes Baader and Raoul Haussmann advanced these practices in their media hoaxes, which

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directly intersected with politics – as opposed to rejecting them – by implementing parafictive strategies.

Johannes Baader and the Berlin Dada media hoaxes Johannes Baader was an unusual character, who has largely been overlooked by histories of Dada. This is due to several factors. Many recollections are generally unfavourable. Most damning are comments made by fellow Berlin Dada member Richard Huelsenbeck in Memoirs of a Dada Drummer in which he states that Baader ‘had absolutely nothing to do with art’.17 Perhaps this is because Baader trained as an architect, defining himself as an architect for a better world and creator of utopias.18 As for his position in 1916, he was declared clinically insane after sending a pacifist letter to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm demanding the end of World War I. The discussion surrounding Baader’s mental health is not easily resolved as he was institutionalized six times, with various diagnoses. After his first breakdown, he stated his depression stemmed from ‘the collapse of the religious edifice’ with frustration and disillusionment with religion reoccurring in Baader’s practice.19 Alternatively, Hausmann suggests that Baader sometimes stayed in sanatoriums during times of financial instability.20 Adrian Sudhalter reinforces this by arguing that Baader’s insanity was a mimicry of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was admitted to the same institution, the University Clinic in Jena, in 1889 and treated by the same psychiatrist.21 Baader was heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s Wahnsinnszettel (Postcards and Letters of Madness) (1889), taking up letter writing in his first published work Briefe eines Toten (Letters of a Dead Man) (1905), which critiqued the field of architecture. He even wrote to Nietzsche’s sister outlining his perceived connection with the philosopher.22 This obsession with Nietzsche could also explain his rejection of the Christian faith, which reoccurs throughout the hoaxes. During the early 1900s, Baader developed his writing, viewing it as ‘a powerful tool: the ultimate instrument of democratic protest which recognized [sic] no boundaries of social demarcation’.23 Through his letters, he realized the potential of harnessing the media as a means of engaging the public. The writings are a precursor to the media hoaxes, showing Baader how he could use words to challenge existing social boundaries and reach a wider audience through the growing field of print media. Regardless of Baader’s mental stability, his status as clinically insane enabled him to engage in acts which would have otherwise seen him imprisoned. Richard Huelsenbeck even referred to this as Baader’s ‘hunting permit’.24 In 1917, Baader and Hausmann began using the media as a vehicle for their parafictive activities and created groups to parody existing

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organizations. The duo were motivated by Baader’s clinical diagnosis, their growing frustration with the ongoing war and the Russian Revolutions in March and October. In April, they founded the Unabhängigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei (Independent Social Democratic Party), which was dedicated to ending the war, parodying the Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, or USPD) and Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland (Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD). They created the mock organization Christus G.m.b.H (Christ Inc.), a sect specifically for deserters of the German Army who, upon changing their name to Christ, would be accepted as conscientious objectors. Baader also sent an open letter to Herr Tereschtschenko, Russia’s newly appointed foreign minister, requesting peaceful diplomatic relations between Russia and Germany. Here the duo employed strategies of letter writing and the formation of fictitious groups to oppose the war and directly engage with the political situation of the time. After their initial explorations in 1917, from April 1918 the duo began to plant their hoaxes in Berlin newspapers, especially Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (B. Z. am Mittag). Hausmann said the pair, ‘without money, without anything else to do, supplied the press with hoaxes, which they promptly printed’.25 It is unknown how many hoaxes were planted due to poor records and their parafictive nature. On 19 July 1918, Baader conceived of his Acht Weltsätze (Eight World Sentences), influenced by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (1918). However, his points were philosophical and general as opposed to Wilson’s pragmatic and specific. He viewed himself as an architect for a better world, one in which the war had ended. The letter was published in B. Z. am Mittag and is recorded as Baader’s first official Dada act, although this was widely accepted as a joke. The paper also stated that he requested Nobel Prizes to be awarded to Berlin Club Dada. Consequently, Baader was referred to as the ‘Oberdada’ for the first time in print on the 29th of August by cultural critic Siegfried Jacobson. The selection of a name is incredibly important when conducting parafictive activities. From the middle of 1918, Baader adopted the name ‘Oberdada’, a character distinct from Baader. Huelsenbeck particularly objected to the title as it implied that Baader was the leader of Berlin Dada. According to Sudhalter, concurrent to the title ‘Oberdada’, he was also known as ‘Otin Gokni’, which is a retrograde of ‘In Kognito’.26 As a character, the Oberdada was developed as the antithesis of the Kaiser, German officials and existing power structures to draw attention to the hypocrisies existing within German politics. The Oberdada, as Stephen Foster suggests, functioned from an ‘extra cultural position from which to speak’, removing himself from the bounds of reality.27 To test out the title, on 7 September 1918, Baader and Hausmann announced the Oberdada’s intention to stand as a candidate to represent Berlin, District One at the Reichstag. The announcement subsequently appeared in four newspapers: the Berliner Mittagszeitung (8 September 1918), the Berliner Tageblatt (9 September

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1918), the Berliner Volks-Zeitung (9 September 1918), and the [Württembergische] Zeitung (11 September 1918), proving that the name ‘Oberdada’ could be successfully employed in the media.28 In 1919, the duo began by announcing the Dada Putsch for the end of January and an inauguration ceremony on the 6th of February, to take place at the Haus Rheingold in the Kaisersaal, where the Oberdada would be proclaimed Präsident des Erdballs (President of the Globe). The 6th of February was significant, being the first date that the newly established Weimar Republic was due to meet. The performance was intended to parody Germany’s new political approach, which placed the upmost importance upon democracy. After the Oberdada became the Präsident des Erdballs, the duo declared on the 1st of March that from the 1st of April there was to be a new Dada-Republic in the area of Berlin-Nikolassee. At the time, there was great unrest in Berlin, as fighting between the KPD and the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps continued. Haussmann wanted to explore the possibility of founding a republic using only a typewriter, avoiding the usual violence and bloodshed. The duo intended to aggrieve the public by posting fictitious fines to the suburb’s residents. On the day of the takeover, the fire department would be telephoned regularly to generate further chaos. The final act would be to occupy the town hall, promptly informing the mayor of the presence of two thousand men willing to take Berlin-Nikolassee by force, if they did not yield. The newly formed Weimar Republic on the 1st of April allegedly organized a regiment of troops in preparation, although no putsch took place. The planned action highlighted the unstable nature of the newly formed government.29 A group of communists and anarchists did in fact overthrow the Bavarian Government in Munich, forming the Bavarian Soviet Republic on 6 April 1919. However, the takeover lasted less than one month, with at least a thousand communists killed by the Freikorps.

Contemporary acts This chapter will now consider the contemporary works of UBERMORGEN and the Yes Men in connection with the Berlin Dada media hoaxes. UBERMORGEN is comprised of Hans Bernhard and lizvlx. The duo have Swiss, Austrian and American heritage and began collaborating in Vienna in 1995. Viewed as pioneers of the net art movement, from the early 1990s, they have worked in the avant-garde medium, treading new ground by using experimental sets to explore new artistic and scientific possibilities. Hans Bernhard and lizvlx also employ a number of pseudonyms. The name ‘UBERMORGEN’ translates as the ‘day after-tomorrow’ or ‘supertomorrow’. Seemingly positive, the term offers negative connotations postWorld War II, with direct links to Nazism. Nietzsche’s term Übermensch (Beyond-Man or Superman) (1883) was appropriated by the Nazis to describe their desire for a superior Germanic master race and the banned

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verse of the German national anthem referred to Deutschland über alles or ‘Germany over others’. Similar to the Oberdada, both names suggest that the artists are functioning from a heightened position and situating themselves as over others. Names are employed as extensions to ridicule and draw attention to political inequalities and inherent hierarchies. The Yes Men are the activist duo Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Based in the USA, the pair have been collaborating as the Yes Men since 1996. Through numerous actions the duo use humour, satire and corporate parody to reveal and challenge inequalities or injustices produced by corporations and governments. The Yes Men are also known by aliases, mostly using Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno rather than their given names. This is in addition to the names they adopt when they engage in identity correction. The Yes Men use identity correction to overidentify with the neoliberal concepts they hope to confront. For example, in Dow Does the Right Thing (2004), the Yes Men set up DowEthics.com. In November of 2004, a researcher from the BBC contacted the website and Andy Bichlbaum was invited to appear on the BBC News as Jude Finisterra, a representative of Dow Chemical on the thirtieth anniversary of the Bhopal explosion. The name Jude Finisterra was selected as Jude is the patron saint of the impossible and Finisterra is the Spanish for the Earth’s end, insinuating that the payment of the reparations was highly improbable. To an audience of 300 million viewers Finisterra accepted full responsibility for the disaster and proposed the liquidation of Union Carbide to provide $12 billion to compensate the victims adequately. The BBC announcement affected the stock prices of Dow Chemical, which fell drastically. Later that day the parafiction was revealed. Aspects of this act are viewed as not ethical by some because the announcement gave the victims false hope as they thought that they would finally receive compensation. It remains the world’s worst industrial accident and, as of 2020, over thirty-five years later, Union Carbide or the Dow Chemical Company (who purchased Union Carbide in 1999) have not adequately compensated the victims of the explosion. The shareholders have remained unaffected by the incident, despite toxic waste still affecting the area. From the Yes Men’s perspective, the intention of the performance was to force Dow to act and the duo argue that it demonstrated ‘that another world is possible’.30 By overidentifying with a chosen group or target, the Yes Men are able to challenge inequalities by demonstrating their extremities. The Yes Men frequently pose as politicians. In July 2017, after the Democratic National Convention in the USA outlined their plans for ‘A Better Deal’ (2017), Andy Bichlbaum adopted the identity of Frank Spencer, the Democratic Vice Chair of Civic Engagement at a live-tweeted press conference in Pasadena, using the hashtag DNCTakeBack.31 Spencer revealed some of the lesser-known details of the plan, which included Medicare for all, the introduction of Universal Basic Income and a ban on corporate lobbyists.32 During the hour-long event, not one member of

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the bipartisan audience doubted the validity of the Democratic Party adopting these new positions. As with Baader’s Acht Weltsätze, in which he proposed a better world, the Yes Men, have used strategies to suggest realistic solutions to existing political policies. The adoption of these policies would equalize living standards and attempt to prevent corruption of the voting process. Both the Yes Men and UBERMORGEN have addressed issues of voter corruption in previous projects. Leading up to the 2016 presidential election the Yes Men had investigated the voting machines used in the USA, planning an intervention in the form of a press conference alongside a video, website and social media accounts. The original video intended to comment on the potential threat of Republican voter suppression, after an envisaged Democratic Party victory. The original video, Trump Election Reporting Devices (2016), offered a critique of the existing voting machines that can be hacked, are produced by privately owned companies and frequently prevent votes from being recounted. It was supposed to demonstrate the lengths that the Republican Party would go to in order to secure votes in the future. However, this was too close to the actuality of the 2016 election, with the subsequent claims of election fraud, alleged Russian interference, paper jams, and accusations that areas with a large number of minorities were denied their vote.33 Following an edit to the Trump Election Reporting Devices (2016) video by the Yes Men that reflected Trump’s win, on the 9th of November, a website and video promoting a new Trump-brand voting machine appeared online. The machine known as the TRD-300 was designed to be ‘uncrackable [sic]’ and set to replace all other voting machines in the USA.34 Shared hundreds of times and with over 190,000 views, the video on Facebook received hundreds of comments, many in support of Trump, including one user’s comment, ‘#trumptrain!! Oh yea he WON!!!! Yay!! Trump Nation. If you don’t like it then move out of this Country [sic].’35 A few comments admitted that they are uncertain of the nature of the post: ‘lmao I cant [sic] tell if it’s satire or not tbh [sic].’36 On the 10th of November, the Yes Men held a press conference to officially launch the TRD-300 at the Trump Soho Hotel, New York, to complete their intervention. Tony Torn, an actor employed by the Yes Men, represented the company, informing the audience that the machines would run on blood because in the future electricity would be scarce. After manically demonstrating how to use the machine, the top floor of the hotel became covered in red liquid, security were called, and they shepherded the audience into a corridor to await the police, who, upon arrival, made no arrests. Consequently, images of Torn lying in a pool of what appears to be blood were tweeted and circulated by those involved.37 The Yes Men demonstrated how votes are still bought and sold, with private companies continuing to assert their influence over the voting system in the USA.38 In an earlier project, UBERMORGEN also considered the voting process in the USA in the work [V]ote-auction.com.39 The website, which was active

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in two iterations, during the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, offered American citizens the opportunity to sell their votes to the highest bidder and was deemed as an act of illegal voter trading. The original site was active between March and July, with the second version online in November 2000. Eight states passed short-term restraining orders and injunctions against [V]ote-auction.com websites for alleged illegal voter trading, which consequently led to all websites associated with the project being shut down and taken offline.40 The case was investigated by the FBI, the NSA and Federal Attorney Janet Reno to prevent corruption of the voter process and ensure that no votes had been brought or sold. [V]ote-auction.com culminated in numerous news reports at both a national and global scale, including Hans Bernard’s interview on CNN’s Burden of Proof, alongside lawyers, politicians and professors.41 The media attention which the project received illustrates that UBERMORGEN’s parafictive act was experienced as fact and led to debate of free-market exchange by exploring the murky differences between bribery, donations and the actual act of selling votes. On the programme, Professor of Internet Law Stuart Biegal, aware of the project’s fictive nature, raised the important point that ‘this wants to call attention to the fact that, on some larger level votes are bought and sold in this country even as we speak’.42 UBERMORGEN grew The Injunction Generator (2001) from the [V]oteauction project.43 The generator appropriated authority by purporting to create requests for legal injunctions and personalized documentation in order to force websites into taking their content offline. Thereby demonstrating the tendency to, as Domenico Quaranta suggests, ‘attach incredible power over the social, physical and psychological life of an individual to a piece of paper or even worse a digital document’.44

Conclusion This historical survey demonstrates that, in times of political unrest and disenchantment, artists have implemented parafictive strategies as a method to challenge their political context. Baader and Hausmann in their media hoaxes opposed World War I and exposed the instability of the Weimar Republic’s position in post-war Germany. The duo attempted to offer alternatives, however ridiculous, to their fellow citizens through performance in public space and the manipulation of newspapers. UBERMORGEN use websites, which replicate the ‘authentic’, to agitate the public, whereas Baader and Hausmann accessed the print media via typewriters and telephones. The Yes Men assume the identities of corporations, politicians and those in power to demonstrate hypocrisies. Evidently a constellation of Baader and Hausmann, both UBERMORGEN and the Yes Men, use their own tactics to create parafictions that comment on political inequalities and begin to propose alternate solutions to existing political problems by

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drawing attention to them. The development of digital media has supported these parafictive practices by offering an additional space for these performative interventions to inhabit and exploit. Presently perceptions of reality are continuously destabilized as parafictive strategies are not only used by artists, with the construction of truth appearing to become less and less relevant. During times of uncertainty, the so-called age of fake news and post-truth, it is evident that parafictions are employed as effective artistic strategies. It is clear how these social turns create new artistic practice, with the roots and spirit of the Berlin Dada media hoaxes permeating through to the present age.

Notes 1 See Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility’, OCTOBER 129 (Summer 2019): 51–84. For further reading, see Bruce Wilshire, ‘The Concept of the Paratheatrical’, TDR 34:4 (1990): 169–78, and Grotowski Encyclopedia, ‘Paratheatre’, Grotowski Encyclopedia, last modified 3 December 2020, https://grotowski.net/en/encyclopedia/paratheatre (12.12.2021). 2 For further reading, see David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 3 Colbert coined the term in his satirical late-night television programme The Colbert Report (2005–14) to describe then US president George W. Bush’s lack of public honesty and use of truths that could not measured by accuracy, but by conviction. ‘Truthiness’ was named Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2006. 4 See ‘The Washington Post Fact Checker,’ The Washington Post, updated 20 January 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trumpclaims-database/ (12.12.2021). In 1,226 days of his presidency, correct as of the 29 May 2020, Trump has made 19,128 false or misleading statements according to ‘The Washington Post Fact Checker’ (2020). These range from the dangerous in relation to health advice and climate change denial to the ridiculous in stating opinion as fact. For example, Trump claims: ‘We [USA] had the greatest economy in history of any country not just ours. The greatest in history.’ This was repeated 335 times since 5 June 2018 and is factually incorrect. Misleading statements include denying previous comments that have been recorded. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump suggested that disinfectant could be injected into the body to prevent the spread of the virus, stating: ‘And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?’ (‘President Trump claims injecting people with disinfectant could treat coronavirus’, The Telegraph, online video, 24 April 2020, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=33QdTOyXz3w: 00:00:24). He later took back this statement, claiming he was using sarcasm (‘The Washington Post Fact Checker’, 2020).

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5 For further reading, see Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum International 44:6 (2006): 178–83, and Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 6 See UBERMORGEN, Interview by Rebecca Smith. Google Hangouts, Liverpool, 24 April 2018. UBERMORGEN.COM will subsequently be referred to as UBERMORGEN (they are known by both names). 7 See Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 1, and Guy Hedgecoe, ‘Spanish elections: How the far-right Vox party found its footing,’ BBC News, 11 November 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-europe-46422036 (12.12.2021). Moffitt includes, as an appendix, a table of twenty-eight global leaders, who have been described as populist by at least six authors in literature on populism. These twenty-eight leaders include not only the more common European, Latin American and Central American examples but also includes leaders such as the Kenyan Ralia Odinga, Filipino Joseph Estrada, Thai Thanksin Shiriawatra, Ugandan Yoweri Museveni, and Zambian Michael Sata. This inclusion of South East Asian and African populist leaders demonstrates the global trend. In this book Moffitt also addresses how this global rise evidences changes in populism in the first two decades of the 2000s due to the embedded nature of media in society and how politics, specifically populism, now functions. 8 Bernie Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist and Jeremy Corbyn a socialist. The initial surge in popularity for socialism appears to have declined by the end of the decade. Sanders ran for President in 2020, however his campaign ended on the 8th of April and saw him endorse Joe Biden for president. Corbyn also stood down as leader of the Labour Party, with Keir Starmer becoming the new leader in 2020. In both these instances Biden and Starmer represent views closer aligned with the centre-left. It could be insinuated that the public, the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party have rejected the polarizing position of socialism in order to avoid further loss of public opinion and support in upcoming elections or referendums. 9 This is particularly significant, as in the forty-four years since the death of dictator Francesco Franco in 1975 only a single far-right seat had been held, between 1979 and 1982; see Hedgecoe, ‘Spanish elections’. 10 During German hyperinflation employment rates fell to 71.8% in December 1923, with close to a third of all trade union members unemployed. (See Laursen and Pedersten 1964: 110 cited in Butler, Hill and Lorenzen 1977: 301.) Butler, Hill and Lorenzen quip: ‘It must surely have seemed to German labor that they first had been cheated by the inflation and then robbed by unemployment’ (1976: 301). Inflation and recessions have an impact on the distribution of income; Butler, Hill and Lorenzen suggest that this redistribution affects ‘labor, the “middle class,” and the rentiers’ (1977: 302) most deeply, which in turn increases inequality. For further reading, see Charles E. Butler, Lewis E. Hill and Stephen A. Lorenzen, ‘Inflation and the Destruction of Democracy: The Case of the Weimar Republic’, Journal of Economic Issues XI :2 (1977): 229–313. After the 2008 global recession many

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governments have implemented regressive austerity measures in Europe. These measures have increased unemployment, homelessness, food insecurity, mental health issues and old-age mortality: see David Stuckler, Aaron Reeves, Rachel Loopstra, Marina Karanikolos and Martin McKee, ‘Austerity and health: the impact in the UK and Europe’, European Journal of Public Health 27 (2017): 18–21. In the USA, the number of people on low incomes has increased, with many becoming newly poor and entering poverty after the recession: see John D. Graham and Kristin S. Seefeldt, America’s Poor and the Great Recession (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 2. 11 ‘Contemporary liberal democratic states are characterised by low and declining levels of political participation and social capital. Citizens feel increasingly estranged from one another, form the institutions which govern them, and from the laws which emanate from these institutions. As a result, many citizens have disengaged from formal and informal politics.’ See Phil Parvin, ‘Is Deliberative Democracy Feasible? Political Disengagement and Trust in Liberal States’, The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry 98:4 (2015): 42. 12 Then US president George W. Bush used the guise of looking for weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq as part of his ‘War on Terror’ post-9/11. In 2004, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) and Duelfer Report (2004) found that, although Saddam Hussein had intention to revive the nuclear and chemical weapon capability of Iraq, no concrete plans or strategy was in place to do so, with no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq by the ISG (2004). The findings of the ISG render the invasion of Iraq by the US and the UK illegal by international law. See Naomi Klein, ‘The Year of the Fake. Don’t think and drive,’ The National, 8 January 2004, https://www.thenation.com/article/ year-fake/ (12.12.2021), and United States Central Intelligence Agency Special Advisor To The Director Of Central Intelligence (2004), Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD [The Duelfer Report, Volume I of III; “Transmittal Message” and “Regime Strategic Intent”; Includes Charts, Photographs, Tables and Illustrations; Part 1 of 3]. Non-Classified, Report. September 30: 1–129. 13 See Bishop, Artificial Hells, 2. 14 See ibid., 3. 15 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001 [1979]), 14. 16 See ibid., 16. 17 Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 67. 18 Benson, when discussing Baader’s best-known work, Das große Plasto-DioDada-Drama: Deutschlands Grösse und Untergang oder Die phantastische Lebensgeschichte des Oberdada (The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany’s Greatness and Decline or The Fantastic Life of the Superdada), also referred to as the Plaso-Dio-Dada-Drama (1920), an assemblage created for the First International Dada Fair (1920) in Berlin, states: ‘The resulting assemblage was both a kind of architectural model of his grand social stratagems and a hieratic shrine, understood through the elaborate

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accompanying scriptures’. See Timothy O. Benson, ‘Mysticism, materialism, and the machine in Berlin Dada’, Art Journal 46 (1987): 52. Baader created architectural drawings for the Cosmic Temple Pyramid (1906), which was a visionary but ultimately unachievable project. The drawings proposed an immense space to contain free education, access to knowledge from global archives, libraries and museums, culture in the form of performances, spaces for the arts set in an idyllic landscape. See Michael White, ‘Johannes Baader’s Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama : the Mysticism of the Mass Media’ Modernism/ modernity 8:4 (2001): 597–8. 19 Adrian Sudhalter, ‘Johannes Baader and the demise of Wilhelmine culture: architecture, Dada and social critique 1875–1920’, PhD thesis (New York Institute: New York, 2005), 29. 20 Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 60. 21 Sudhalter, ‘Johannes Baader’, 134. 22 See ibid., 184–90. 23 Ibid., 81. 24 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 314. 25 Sudhalter, ‘Johannes Baader’, 231. 26 Ibid., 243. 27 Stephen Foster, ed., Dada: Dimensions (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 252. 28 See Sudhalter, ‘Johannes Baader’, 238–9. 29 Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 62. 30 The Yes Men, ‘Dow Does the Right Thing’, 2004, https://www.theyesmen.org/ project/dow-does-right-thing (12.12.2021). 31 See Twitter, #dnctakeback, (n.d.). 32 Frank Spencer, DNCTakeBack official highlights reel, 1 August 2017, video, YouTube, 19:52, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3wEc9uxKZI (12.12.2021). 33 The results in the report of the two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 Trump campaign to influence the result of the 2016 US presidential election found no collusion or coordination (2019: 2). However, the Mueller Report could not categorically state that Trump had not obstructed the course of justice stating that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him’ (2019: 182). See Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, March 2019, https://gamescdn.washingtonpost.com/ notes/prod/default/documents/f5fe536c-81bb-45be-86e5-a9fee9794664/note/ a8d336ef-e98d-4a08-987d-b4c154b22700.pdf (12.12.2021). 34 Trump Election Reporting Devices, Powerful new video from President Donald Trump, 9 November 2016, video, 1:27, Facebook, https://www. facebook.com/200665750375324/videos/200710190370880/ (12.12.2021).

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35 Trump Election Reporting Devices, We’re Making America Great Again! Share If You Agree, 9 November 2016, Facebook post and comments, https://www. facebook.com/Trump-Election-Reporting-Devices-200665750375324/?eid=A RA_6H5i7ipR5fDiZ0jf81Jdyf44w-S8IdUfHGThZlWK8ZkF69a9qUZSa14C9MjtauThgXRmzbPs08E&hc_ref=ARQhXBQWBbhBvaQ5Opr wZHSfvc5h2WmF6ZvShbm6D5lrZe76tCrPNtHF52cTE7I2P4&fref= nf&__xts__[0]=68.ARBSyhjslpn8NZejfwi5E9FZ6Qc_OiG0Hqv1JlbK0eg6uV8g_w0nJdi25cfgKeJBORB7DODlgBfQiBx1K7Hw835yQX192 eQR7CK925VN2oxUqPdrc8XnGGaCLbduZXsK4B6IYAw74cGtZT hitWBT20BVxXEEaHB1oRgjpvnQDPPPsh-v_tZ4W-e0ecYzhSN6%20 CUwdopuzf9uALleMLcSfuD1HqeCNSJhsU-BZSf-HfzMIiqt_h2IC cIVJUM2OlqrbLLper5IYC3qlwhLMn7_KplYxwWjbAxbQwDF_ YZNza1y9NMTx4xaFPfJKBw_USSqPTKqWBI5XOf0-BXO4Qxzun MRG2MmIpjg (12.12.2021). 36 Trump Election, America Great Again. 37 Unfortunately, both the associated website and tweets are no longer active; the blog post and Facebook page are still active, the details of which are cited in footnotes 31 and 32. 38 This is of particular relevance with the revelations of mass data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in 2018. They used approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without owner permission in order to develop a system, using personalized political advertisements based on psychological profiles to target US voters. The implication was that these covert methods were used during the 2016 American election to potentially solicit votes. Similar tactics were used by the British Vote Leave campaign in 2016. Vote Leave employed Canadian firm AggregateIQ (AIQ) to target adverts at previously unreachable citizens, who had become disenfranchised with the British political system, feeding and learning from their concerns, desires and fears. 39 UBERMORGEN.COM, [V]ote-Auction, http://www.vote-auction.net/ (12.12.2021). 40 Ibid. 41 UBERMORGEN.COM, [V]ote Auction – CNN – Burden of Proof, 2000, video, 27:08, https://vimeo.com/19218313 (12.12.2012). 42 Ibid., 00:15:37. 43 The Injunction Generator (2001) formed the basis for the five works that form UBERMORGEN’S Generator Tetralogy (2000–9), which comprises of the Injunction Generator (2001), Bankstatement Generator (2005), Psych OS Generator (2006) and Superenhanced Generator (2006). 44 Domenico Quaranta, UBERMORGEN.COM (Morrisville: Lulu.com, 2015), 237.

montage mädels

Our Collective Practice: A Visual Essay

Our collaborative visual essay comments on the practice behind our net-art photomontages, outlining their role as a form of visual note-taking, research and mining of the maelstrom of ‘data’ we consume every day. Our practice is about asserting that, even though we live under a state of surveillance where our behaviour is algorithmically influenced, media is not just something that is done to you. To montage is to chew up all the bullshit messaging and relentless perception management and spit it back out as an encrypted copy. Nothing can’t be stripped down, derided or deconstructed. Our practice identifies social media’s coercive self-curation and the art market’s fetishization of the original into a reified asset. Our practice understands that aggressive, hyper-alienated patriarchy drives an ascendent alt-right digital culture. To resist this toxicity, we reimagine creativity as sisterly communality.

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montage mädels, Our Collective Practice: A Visual Essay, 2019, Ephemeral Photomontage (previously analogue, now digital), © Creative Commons.

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PART TWO

Global Dada

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CHAPTER FOUR

Sheida Soleimani, Cyborg: Photomontage in an Expanding Network Matthew Biro

Photomontage remains a vital strategy today, one that exists within an expanding network of audiovisual creation. Contemporary artist Sheida Soleimani is a case in point. Like the artists of the historical avant-garde, she makes political art: creative work that criticizes the existing social and political order while simultaneously imagining new forms of identity better suited to life in a rapidly changing and still-globalizing world. Even more than the Dadaists and Surrealists, however, Soleimani – a beneficiary of the rapid growth of mass communication technologies that facilitate intermediality – reveals herself to be engaged in complex cross-media dialogues in which photography, video, sculpture, installation, performance and the internet are combined across series of works. As I will argue, it is Soleimani’s intermediality that enables her to update and advance avantgarde photomontage and to create powerful political artworks that amplify the presence and impact of the interwar strategy by – in particular – developing its three-dimensional (sculptural-tactile) and four-dimensional (time-based and performative) qualities.1 Like that of many young artists today (she turned thirty in 2020), Soleimani’s practice is disruptive and unruly – she employs strategies of appropriation and montage to contest sexism, racism and militarism, while affirming hybrid subject positions through her treatment of the human body and construction of complex multi-figure tableaus that situate people outside of traditional categories of gender, race and national origin. In many 75

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ways, Soleimani can be considered a subaltern cyborg – subaltern because she deals with legacies of colonialism from an anti-colonialist perspective; and a cyborg because she embraces the strategies and technologies of the mass media as extensions of her body and her mind.2 She is also a feminist in the sense that a strong critique of patriarchy pervades her work. Born in the United States, in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1990, and currently based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is the child of refugees who fled persecution in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the early and mid-1980s. She grew up in the American Midwest hearing stories about her parent’s experiences living under the Shah’s and Ayatollah’s regimes: after the Islamic Revolution, her father, a doctor, had to go into hiding for three years and her mother, a nurse, was imprisoned and tortured.3 In her first major body of photomontage work, National Anthem, constructed between 2014 and 2016, and begun while she was still in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the artist engaged with this legacy, making allegorical photographs of Iran, a country she had never visited in person. Broken representations of an imagined country in which graphic violence intermixes with vivid sensuality, these ‘rephotographed’ photocollage and object environments both embraced and transformed the (pre-digital) avant-garde strategy of photomontage through technologies and techniques drawn from contemporary commercial and digital photography.4 In particular, as we shall see, rephotography makes the cuts and sutures of the photomontage technique less immediately apparent and jarring – a fact of which the later Heartfield was also well aware. In Soleimani’s artworks, rephotography reminds us of how quickly radical media techniques become assimilated by the culture industry as well as of the fact that this assimilation can lead to new possibilities for radical practice. By making the fantastic assemblages of photographic fragments more real – more physically cohesive and ‘present’, as it were – rephotography can make photomontage more shocking and subversive again, at least, with the ‘right’ juxtapositions and in the ‘correct’ context, as Soleimani’s work shows so well. To make her National Anthem, Soleimani printed out images sourced from the internet – politicians, religious figures, soldiers, prisoners, executioners and ordinary people, as well as Persian rugs and other patterned forms – that she then combined with three-dimensional objects both natural and man-made. The resulting dioramas, or tabletop sculptures, in which appropriated images were mixed with raw and processed foods, toys, pebbles, plants, hair, leaves, wigs, sugar cubes and fabrics, were carefully lit and then rephotographed with a high-resolution medium-format digital camera.5 And the images that emerged, whose constituent parts signified Iran in a variety of different discursive registers, suggested twisted propaganda posters or surreal product displays, images that merged twoand three-dimensional space in powerful and confounding ways. In Lachrymatory Agent, 2014 (Figure  4.1), Soleimani placed cut-out photographic eyes within a larger configuration of three-dimensional

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FIGURE 4.1 Sheida Soleimani, Lachrymatory Agent, 2014. Archival pigment print, 24 × 17 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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objects, which include hand grenades, onions and Coca Cola bottles, both broken and whole. Evoking the Arab world uprisings that erupted in late 2010 – onions and Coca Cola were street remedies for tear gas – as well as the self-reflexive (and sometimes upside-down) eyeball iconography of Dada artists like Hannah Höch, the image implies both martyrdom and consumption. It suggests a wounded or executed body, but also the hyperdetailed and saturated aesthetics of contemporary advertising and food photography. As a result of these contradictions, the image promotes reflexivity about the photographic medium as well as questions about its effects on the body. Because of the formal similarities between the flat eyeballs and the volumetric objects, our awareness of the play between two and three dimensions is intensified; photography, the image thereby reminds us, preserves the body, but it can also freeze and kill it. And within this suggested horizon of meaning, montage itself appears as suspect. In cinema, for example, montage brings still images to life; but, as Dada art has demonstrated to us, montage can also stand as a sign of dismemberment and trauma – a stand-in for acts of torture and violence as well as processes of commemoration.6 And by drawing upon this long history of montage, Soleimani’s photograph prompts us to question our place in media history – how, it motivates us to ask, have we arrived at this exceedingly complex state of affairs? Neda¯, 2014 (Figure 4.2), on the other hand, does not abstractly replicate violence like Lachrymatory Agent, which perhaps conjures – but never directly represents – the violence that Soleimani’s mother experienced during her imprisonment. Instead, the predominantly grey, pink and green photomontage focuses on a specific historical personage by reconfiguring the dying visage of Neda¯ A¯gha¯-Solta¯n, the 26-year-old philosophy student murdered by the Iranian Basij paramilitary, during protests against the re-election of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. Compiling different screen grabs of the dying woman appropriated from a viral YouTube video, the photograph also contains objects with symbolic connotations: sugar cubes, which in Iran are sometimes used to calm animals before slaughter; a toy ladder covered with blistered and peeling paint, which could signify ascension but also recalls images of public hangings; and a wilting hyacinth, a flower traditionally used in the Persian Nowruz celebration to represent the coming of spring. By suggesting both death and transcendence in the internet era, Neda¯ conveys the power of the media to support domination as well as revolution. It also reminds us of the long history of martyr images within the medium of photomontage – as in, for example, the work of Heartfield, who, like Soleimani, appropriated images of dead people, both known and unknown victims – in order to suggest historical loss and violence. Soleimani’s photomontage, however, also distinguishes itself from its Berlin Dada forebears. This can be seen, first of all, in the greater tension that Soleimani creates between two- and three-dimensional forms in comparison to the work of the Germans. Through a combination of analogue and digital

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FIGURE 4.2 Sheida Soleimani, Neda¯, 2014. Archival pigment print, 24 × 17 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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means that allow her to imaginatively mix photomontage, assemblage and rephotography, Soleimani’s photomontages create more of a push-pull effect – a more pronounced interplay between the flattening and expansion of pictorial space – than those of the Dadaists. In addition, her work is also more visceral and grotesque. With its juxtaposition of artificial, garish colour with grey, dying flesh, as well as its gory and unsettling iconography, Neda¯ makes the Dada photomontages of Höch – and even Heartfield – seem less shocking in comparison. Paired frog legs, which emerge from the severed neck openings of two of Neda¯’s visages and which are also positioned on a rock in front of the pink ladder, underscore this distinction. Evoking a person’s naked, possibly flayed lower limbs in both spread and crossed positions as well as uncooked food, these elements simultaneously evoke both sexuality and consumption. Ambiguous and unsettling, they potentially remind the spectator of the increase in sexual assaults that occur during times of war and revolution as well as the gender-based violence that many Iranian women suffer while imprisoned by the state. The explicitness with which she conflates sex, violence and the pleasure of consumption is something that distinguishes Soleimani, and is, paradoxically, a characteristic that gives her representations their undeniable political bite and resonance. In other National Anthem photographs, the faces of dictators and religious leaders are altered with animal parts, food and candles; and abstract fabric patterns are merged with the bodies of torture victims. Mixing beauty with horror, they are focused on human rights violations, while at the same time employing sensuous colour, detailed surface and an appreciation of sophisticated graphic design. As Soleimani developed her photomontage practice in the National Anthem series, it became more volumetric and tactile, and she began to focus more and more on female victims of religious and political violence. In Vitriolic Acid: An Eye for an Eye, 2015 (Figure 4.3), we are presented with another uncanny hybrid of portraiture and still life: a photomontage environment in which are configured grapes, eyes and the fragmented face of an acid-attack victim that Soleimani discovered on the internet. Once again, the violence of photomontage is harnessed in service of social and political critique – the horror of an acid attack is emphasized by the traumatic connotations that are part of the formal history of photomontage as an avant-garde technique. As was the case with Dada photomontage, the cut-and-pasted photographic fragment is mobilized to express the artist’s bitter criticism of a horrifying form of attack, one that is often directed at women. In certain ways, Soleimani hyperbolizes the (critical) strategy of Dada montage; but, in addition, there is a recuperative impulse. While it is true that photomontage is here used to attack the status quo, it is also employed to trigger historical recovery and engagement with both personal and collective history. Sourcing images on the world wide web, for the artist, was part of a larger process of gathering information and of doing research; it was a practice that allowed Soleimani to get in touch with her specific family history while also respecting

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FIGURE 4.3 Sheida Soleimani, Vitriolic Acid: An Eye for an Eye, 2015. Archival pigment print, 24 × 17 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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the documentary function of the photographic medium as well as the documentary photographer’s responsibility to register and describe atrocities. Having heard her mother describe her own physical traumas, Soleimani sourced corelates in the digital sphere, images that commemorated more recent victims of Iran. Soleimani’s research on Iran, gender and human rights led to To Oblivion, a new series of works, which focused on murdered women and the images that circulated of them in the wake of their disappearances. As she recalled, Because my mother went through what she did, after I finished National Anthem, I started to think about a series that focused specifically on women. In Iran, human rights abuses happen mostly to women, although homosexuality, adultery and not being religious are also grounds for some type of torture to be inflicted. Instead of telling a story just about my mother, I wanted to talk about all the women in the country who are undocumented and who don’t get their stories told, because the government tries to make them disappear, by not putting out news or information about their executions. To make this series, Soleimani sourced images of violated and murdered Iranian women from the open web, Amnesty International and the Iran Human Rights Watch, individuals whose visages she transformed into frightening photomontage memorials. Collecting images made her aware that her first collation of images was only the tip of the iceberg. Because of Iran’s censorship of the internet, she had to go beyond the visages and bodies she could easily find, employing the dark web to contact the families of ‘disappeared women’, individuals killed by the Iranian government and court system, often to cover up men’s crimes.7 Locating a digital community of people dedicated to preserving their murdered loved ones’ images, Soleimani engaged this collective by asking for pictures to memorialize.8 Soleimani’s memorials took the form of sculptural photomontages, works like Atefeh, 2016 (Figure 4.4), Shahla, 2016, and Zahra, 2016, stuffed and sewn cotton shapes, on which the photographic visages of disappeared women were pigment printed.9 She also made flat photographs with these subjects, employing the more two-dimensional photomontage technique from her National Anthem series. Engaging with the thematics of what Hito Steyerl called the ‘poor image’, images as records of missing or dead persons, both the two- and the three-dimensional works that Soleimani created were memorializing.10 But even more than the flat images, Soleimani’s photomontage soft sculptures seem like endeavours to recapture or restore the existences that were lost. They suggest attempts to give flattened pixellated images new life, to expand them and give them breath and animation. And by memorializing surrogates for her mother, Soleimani commemorates lives unjustly lost, while approaching a ‘homeland’ that she probably will never visit in person.

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FIGURE 4.4 Sheida Soleimani, Atefeh, 2016. Archival pigment print on cotton, paracord, dimensions variable. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. Photograph by Will Amlot. Courtesy Edel Assanti.

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It is perhaps this distance that exists between Soleimani and the country from which her parents came that motivates the insistent tactility and physicality of her photomontages. Because of the vehemence and intensity of her social and political criticisms, the artist is unable to ever visit Iran; after her work became known, she received countless threats from the country via Facebook and email. And possibly for this reason, Soleimani attempts to make the absent site of her ‘origins’ as real and material as she can. How does one summon an absent site or location – an abstraction of a homeland that one has never visited in person – when all one possesses are texts and images, abstract representations of the real? The haptic and the tactile, Soleimani’s work suggests, may be one solution, a strategy of recuperation that allows her to approach a fundamental absence that structures her art. Soleimani’s engagement with her personal history, on the other hand, occludes neither the political nor the artistic and self-reflexive in her work. The soft-sculpture memorials distort the women, giving them large heads and tiny bodies that make them appear childlike and slightly monstrous. When set within the physical space of the gallery or home, the To Oblivion sculptures are often juxtaposed with flat photographs of the same subjects (Figure 4.5), some of them containing images of the sculptures next to which they stand. Setting up multiple dialectics – between photographic and real space, original and copy, fiction and non-fiction – these installations make us aware of photography as a matrix of both flattening and expansion, murder and remembrance. Avant-garde photomontage, these works suggest, helped to foster a greater awareness of photography as a technology that allows people to reimagine the world, and thereby to begin to remake it. The interwar period also made people aware that this photographically inspired process of reimagining the real possessed both hegemonic and emancipatory potentials. Soleimani’s expanded photomontage practices seem consciously designed to consistently remind the viewer of photography’s double-sided nature, its ideological as well as its redemptive possibilities. Her work investigates and criticizes social and political injustices, and it attempts to remember and memorialize the dead, recall their tragedies in service of avoiding similar injustices in the future. But at the same time, through their fantastic nature, as well as their uneasy coupling of pleasure and pain, Soleimani’s artworks also remind us that photography was never a fully ‘objective’ medium, and all attempts at photographic representation – both ‘straight’ and montaged – carry possibilities as well as dangers. The forms of the To Oblivion series, as Soleimani points out, were based on ‘Bobo dolls’, the name of toys used in a famous set of social psychology experiments that took place in the United States in the early 1960s. These dolls were figures that resembled a child’s punching bag in that they wobbled when hit and then righted themselves. They were used in a famous set of experiments conducted by psychologist Albert Bandura in which he demonstrated the cornerstone of his famous social learning theory: namely,

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FIGURE 4.5 Sheida Soleimani, Raheleh, 2016. Archival pigment print, 40 × 27 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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that human beings learned by observing others.11 In Bandura’s case, one focus in his inquiry was how children learned aggression by observing an adult mistreat a Bobo doll – when exposed to such a stimulus they were more likely to exhibit the same behaviour themselves. In the context of Soleimani’s To Oblivion series, this Bobo doll form became a way of suggesting how violence is taught today in Iran through public punishments and executions. In addition, this trope raises the question of Soleimani’s relationship to the Dada tradition, which also linked photomontage with dolls. The Dadaist interest in dolls reflected a number of different concerns, including their celebration of unconventional, sometimes infantile behaviour as a way of criticizing bourgeois values and disrupting everyday life as well as their embrace of the forms and motifs of cabaret and theatrical performance. In addition, as Doherty has argued, dolls and childlike figures may also evoke the war neurotic’s desire for regression to an earlier stage of existence, connotations that informed the Berlin Dadaists’ use of montage to suggest shell shock and wartime trauma.12 Examples of Dada dolls comprise works like Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s psychoanalytically inspired marionettes created in 1918 for Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century play, King Stag; Heartfield’s puppets for German Soldier Songs, which he adapted after World War I for Max Reinhardt’s Smoke and Mirrors cabaret; and Hannah Höch’s Dada dolls, with which she performed and which she also exhibited in venues like the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920.13 In Dada photomontage, we find many doll-like portraits, by which I mean simplified, childlike figures, shapes that evoke childhood and different forms of play. As we shall see in the next section, such forms were particularly prominent among Höch’s later Weimar photomontages, where they were employed in socially critical ways. ‘By the mid-twenties,’ as Lavin notes, ‘Höch was regularly using doll or mannequin images to comment ironically on the cultural construction of femininity.’14 *

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As we have seen, Soleimani always draws from multiple historical sources, including avant-garde and contemporary art, Iranian history and current events – a strategy that results in a richness of meaning and connotation. In terms of artistic precedents, however, Soleimani’s Iran photomontages perhaps most resemble those of the Berlin Dadaists, and in particular, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield. Like Höch’s photomontages, particularly those of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s, both the National Anthem and the To Oblivion photographs present portraits and tableaus of mismatched body parts, eschewing the more news-reportage approach we find in Heartfield’s cinematic book covers for Malik Verlag in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as his Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung [AIZ] and Volks-Illustrierte [VI] photomontages between 1930 and 1938, which leave the human body much more intact, and instead juxtapose multiple fictive spaces created by different figure groups.15 At the same time, however, like Heartfield, Soleimani focuses

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on specific individuals and political personages in her works – a selection of source materials that puts her at odds with Höch, who tended to appropriate more unidentifiable figures in her later Weimar photomontages. Soleimani is perhaps most like Höch in her construction of the human figure, which tends towards the childlike and grotesque. This Dada doll trope, of the adult reduced to a child – or to some other less-than-human, but still humanoid, status – also appears prominently in Höch’s photomontages. As suggested by Höch’s Russian Dancer (My Double) [Russische Tänzerin (Mein Double)], 1928 (Figure 4.6), which represents Til Brugman, Höch’s lesbian lover between 1926 and 1935,16 Höch used the Dadaist figure of the womangirl to explore hybrid identity and the construction of one’s selfhood through interactions with significant others. Like Raoul Hausmann, Höch’s understanding of the self was influenced by anarchist and psychoanalytic thought of Franz Jung, Otto Gross and other writers associated with the journal, Die freie Strasse.17 Central to Gross’s theories were the ideas that the structures and contradictions of capitalist societies were directly related to the repressive nature of the patriarchal bourgeois ego and that a sexual revolution had to take place before a true social revolution could occur.18 As conveyed by her twisted but playful and athletic pose, masculinizing monocle and page-boy haircut, Höch’s Dada woman-girl is both beautiful and grotesque. Her mismatched, glued-together body parts, which are fitted into a compressed stage-like space, seem balanced by the fact that they appear to function in a highly coordinated fashion. Russian Dancer thus operates as a means to attack the viewer’s preconceived notions of a ‘rational’ self, something that it achieves by undermining the ideal human form. In addition, with the image’s connotations of mirroring or doubling through its pairing with the similarly shaped and posed self-portrait, English Dancer [Englische Tänzerin], 1928, Russian Dancer can be read as an inducement to construct a new sense of identity in conjunction with a significant other. Like Höch, Soleimani focuses on hybridity and the construction of complex intersectional identities through interactions with others and with the products of mass culture and the mass media. Their works engage with psychoanalytic content; and they use the body and sexuality as springboards for reimaging what it means to be human. Like Heartfield, on the other hand, Soleimani is an explicitly political artist, sourcing images of real people and news events, and mobilizing them to create a complex and open-ended commentary on her contemporary situation. Heartfield’s photomontage, The Nation Stands United Behind Me [Die Nation steht geschlossen hinter mir], from AIZ 12:27 (13 July 1933) (Figure 4.7), presents a classic example of Heartfield’s avant-garde political photomontage. Here Heartfield combines a large portrait of Hitler striding forward and stepping out of the picture field with an aerial shot of a dense urban crowd and (on the edges of the frame) fragments of a map of Germany. Der Führer holds a chain which encircles the German State; and he is aided by groups of his Sturmabteilung paramilitary soldiers, who are larger than

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FIGURE 4.6 Hannah Höch, Russische Tänzerin (MeinDouble) [Russian Dancer (My Double)]. Photomontage. 12 × 8⅞ in. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick, Germany (joint property of Braunschweigischer Vereinigter Kloster- und Studienfonds). © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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FIGURE 4.7 John Heartfield, “Die Nation steht geschlossen hinter mir” (The Nation stands united behind me), from AIZ, Vol. 12, No. 27, July 13, 1933, Page 467, 1933. Photogravure 14¾ in × 10⅜ in (37.47 cm × 26.35 cm). © 2021 The Heartfield Community of Heirs / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn.

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the figures of the crowd, and who also grasp the chain that constrains the nation. The photomontaged images are overlaid with three main blocks of text. The topmost, ‘The nation stands united behind me’, quotes a recent speech by Hitler, in which he affirmed the nation’s resolve as well as its approval of his policies. The middle headline, ‘Concentration Camp Germany’, seems to present Heartfield’s primary message about the contemporary political situation in Europe – through a wave of political arrests, his former country was becoming a dictatorship. And, finally, ‘I no longer know parties. I know only prisoners’, was a slight misquotation of a line uttered by Kaiser Wilhelm at the beginning of World War I, who actually finished with the patriotic, ‘I only know Germans’. By undermining the phrase’s patriotism, Heartfield underlines continuities between the authoritarian rule of the country’s former Kaiserreich and that of present-day Nazi Germany. Through an interplay of texts and images, Heartfield’s photomontage engages its viewers, using humour to encourage them to see beneath Hitler’s political propaganda. Although its main meaning is clear and pronounced, it is by no means simple. It compares contemporary Germany to the nation on the eve of World War I; and it in part revolves around the multiple meanings of the German word geschlossen, which can signify closed in the sense of shut or locked up but also united or unified. Although clearly artificial, it proports to show a ‘truth’, but in a way that is open-ended and that encourages its viewers to view their worlds critically and with suspicion. In the context of the magazine as a whole, AIZ 12:27, 1933, Heartfield’s photomontage introduced an article on the Nazi arrests of political opponents that had begun after Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, and the contemporary camps the new government was erecting to hold political prisoners. (In this two-page spread, entitled ‘In Deutschland Nichts Neues!’, a pun on Erich Maria Remarque’s classic antiwar novel from 1928, All Quite on the Western Front, images of police and men with their arms raised are repeated so as to suggest the rapid growth of mass incarceration in Germany.)19 Soon, as the historical record shows, detention camps would be used to detain other minorities including Jews, homosexuals and Roma (Gypsies), and, shortly thereafter, these installations would directly support the Nazi’s mass extermination and eugenics policies.20 Made of fragments of world news – documentary photographs, quotes and reports – Heartfield’s photomontage thus remade its contemporary reality to envision and predict a terrifying near future. Although clarity was central to its presentation, so was the embrace of connotation and play, something that makes the accuracy of its forecast seem perhaps even more terrifying. Like Heartfield, Soleimani reinterprets current and historical events in her Iran photomontages and photo-sculptures, mobilizing the past and the present to imagine the near future. Unlike Heartfield, however, Soleimani did not emphasize language in her work until after the To Oblivion series. Indeed, although Soleimani titled her works, she was even less linguistic

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than Höch, who at the very least inscribed her name and the title beneath the frame of the image, something that Soleimani did not do. This aversion to linguistically coded content changed radically in 2017, when Soleimani began her Medium of Exchange series, a photomontage-based corpus of mixed-media works that explored trauma and memory, sexuality and violence, Middle East politics, and diasporic experience. Language emerged in Soleimani’s art, however, not primarily through texts but through performances, sounds and spoken words. *

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As we have seen, Soleimani has practised photomontage with a keen awareness of its history. At the same time, by embracing digital technologies in all their forms, she has also intermixed photomontage with other media far more than any of the original avant-gardists. As a result, her work seems to be able to combine divergent attitudes far more easily than their work; and in particular, closer examination of her most recent work shows her to mix divergent ‘attitudes’ or perspectives that have traditionally set Dada and Surrealism apart, namely conceptual alienation versus corporeal engagement. According to Rosalind Krauss, the pivotal difference between Dada photomontage and Surrealist photography had to do with the relative presence of either the photographer or the world in the image itself. Surrealist ‘photographs are not interpretations of reality, decoding it, as in Heartfield’s photomontages. They are presentations of that very reality as configured, or coded, or written’.21 The obvious cuts and jarring juxtapositions of the Dadaists, in other words, often separated from one another by the white page that constituted their support, distanced the spectator from the photographs’ indexical sources, an alienation that allowed viewers to perceive their images as conceptual statements about the world: subjective, allegorical interpretations of social and political tendencies.22 The Surrealists, on the other hand, largely eschewed photomontage, opting for other techniques of doubling or defamiliarizing the image, manipulations that preserved the physical world’s presence, while at the same time allowing it to appear as mysterious or uncanny. Dada photomontages thus foregrounded the presence of the artist (or cultural producer) and the interpretive – or even partisan – nature of the image, while Surrealist photographs emphasized the presence of the world (and the subjects within it), albeit one that was written or coded, permeated by meaning. As suggested by Medium of Exchange, Soleimani’s most recent largescale project, Krauss’s distinction between the Dadaist and Surrealist approach to photography – viewer alienation (and the concomitant emphasis on the conceptual nature of the image) or mystery and uncanniness (with its stress on the polysemy of the world and the people within it) – no longer makes much sense; at least, when used to examine the work of radical artists like Soleimani. A series of photographs, videos and print publications, Medium of Exchange is based on intense research that the artist conducted

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into the relationships between the US and OPEC nations since 1960, when the organization was first formed. Largely relying on appropriated texts and images, the project presents documentary evidence pertaining to war and the oil trade in the Middle East, Africa and South America. The resulting images and scenes, nonetheless, are wildly fantastic: absurd reconstructions or reimaginings of the real. Different iterations of the project, which began in 2016, have appeared in different venues starting in 2018, including the Edel Assanti Gallery, London; Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; and the CUE Art Foundation, New York. In 2019, yet another iteration appeared at Library Street Collective, Detroit. Sometimes, just the photographs were presented; in other installations, only the video was playing. The black-andwhite publications, which intermix screen grabs from the video and reproductions of Soleimani’s photographs and combine them with their written and visual documentary source materials, provided an additional conduit through which the artist imparted her message to the public. And in all of these configurations, Soleimani explored the impact of political and economic power on the body, reimaging abstract relations through uncanny, allegorical personifications. Different exhibitions present varied aspects of a much larger story. In Atlanta, nine freestanding 60 × 40 inch photographs – supported by custommade oil-can frames – presented a twisted history of the US–OPEC relationship (Figure 4.8). Most of them depicted tableaus in which one or

FIGURE 4.8 Installation view of Sheida Soleimani: Medium of Exchange, Atlanta Contemporary, 2018. Courtesy Atlanta Contemporary.

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two figures – actors wearing photomontage masks bearing the stitchedtogether visages of assorted government officials – interacted within a photo-sculptural environment. In one, Dick Cheney, wearing only a $100bill towel and a baseball cap, holds hands with the only slightly more dressed Donald Rumsfeld: half-human, half-photographic lovers, canoodling in a gridded environment of repeating pipelines, explosions and Halliburton insignias (Figure 4.9). In another, a bare-breasted Henry Kissinger on bended knee, his male head montaged on a female body, raises an oil-smeared diamond ring to the partially nude José María Botelho de Vasconcelos, Angola’s Minister of Petroleum. Soleimani’s political targets are also clearly hybrid – their bodies mix gender and race, and their sexuality seems to flow in normative as well as non-normative directions (Figure 4.10). More than just emphasizing sexuality, however, the actors’ poses foreground relations of domination and submission, while the environments in which they exist reference war and oil production. Like John Heartfield’s photomontages for the AIZ and VI, the large-scale Medium of Exchange photographs disrupt political and economic power through appropriation, photomontage and irony, creating visual allegories that both document and criticize official agents and events. But much more than Heartfield, Soleimani emphasizes the indexical presence of her subjects by using live actors in conjunction with photomontage masks and a photosculptural, prop-laden environment (Figure 4.11). Thus, while at the same time she continues Heartfield’s emphasis on the interpretive nature of the constructed image into which appropriated reports and other forms of documentary evidence have been fitted, she makes her photomontages seem more physical and as a result her allegories of power become even more perverse. This powerful ‘critical perversity’, in many ways a legacy of Höch’s polymorphously perverse photomontage work, can be seen in the bizarre eroticism of many of Soleimani’s configurations, as well as in how strongly her tableaus resist and subvert the primary ruling pieties that govern today’s social, political and economic world orders. The project’s first video, Medium of Exchange, 2018, which premiered at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati in 2018, demonstrated this as well: it focused on sex and violence, while dismantling clear distinctions between gender, race and class.23 Throughout the 32-minute work, a scene repeats in which two sets of masculine hands play a violent game of Slapjack with a pack of Iraq’s Most Wanted playing cards (Figure 4.12). Depicted in bird’s-eye view, their game is set against a photomontaged tabletop consisting of fragments of a checkered picnic cloth mixed with images of fires, desert and US military compounds during the 2003 Iraq War. On the audio track, a child reads military correspondence about food policy on US bases; and as the game progresses, the actors’ hands, cards and table surface became occluded with black viscous oil. Intercut with this increasingly obscure game, a number of live-action tableaus appear in which the same political figures that star in the large-scale photographs speak to one another in dialogues appropriated from declassified

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FIGURE 4.9 Sheida Soleimani, Vice President and Secretary of Defense (United States), Halliburton CEOs, 2017. Archival pigment print, 60 × 40 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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FIGURE 4.10 Sheida Soleimani, Minister of Petroleum (Angola), Secretary of State (United States, 1973–77), 2017. Archival pigment print, 40 × 60 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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FIGURE 4.11 Sheida Soleimani, Inauguration (United States, Iraq), 2017. Archival pigment print, 18 × 24 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

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FIGURE 4.12 Sheida Soleimani, Medium of Exchange, 2018. 32-minute digital video, screen grab. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

FIGURE 4.13 Sheida Soleimani, Medium of Exchange, 2018. 32-minute digital video, screen grab. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani. military documents, political dispatches and documentary news sources (Figure 4.13). Acting out scenarios that evoke both love and hate, attraction and repulsion, the actors become integrated with one another and the environment through erotic contact as well as by means of flowing substances like oil, candle wax and runny ice cream. Repeatedly drawing parallels between sexuality and consumption, the video integrates the living with the

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photographed body to create an uncanny mixture of identification and alienation. According to the artist, the Medium of Exchange video is intended as the first in a series of approximately fourteen films. Whether this series will reach completion or not remains to be seen. But what is already clear from Soleimani’s complex multimedia project is that our bodies lie at the centre of multiple and conflicting symbolic systems, complex networks of representation that can either liberate or enslave. By embracing both alienation and seduction – the Dada and the Surrealist photographic traditions – Medium of Exchange proves that radical art remains possible today, a practice Soleimani conducts as a type of formally and materially complex investigation that remains grounded in photomontage but sets the strategy in an expanding network of mass-media technologies. *

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At the beginning of this essay, I called Soleimani a subaltern cyborg, with subaltern standing for her concentration on colonial histories, and cyborg because of the technologies that she uses and the ways she represents the body as permeated by industry and manufactured goods. I would now like to clarify this appellation by insisting that Soleimani is a cyborg first, and subaltern only in less fundamental way. The nature of her research is such that her focus on colonialism in her most recent work could easily shift again (to a greater concentration on gender, for example), but her formal development has always been firmly concentrated on the relationship between the body and lens-based technology, and this concentration seems only to grow more intense as time passes. A third aspect of Soleimani’s practice that marks her as a cyborg is her adoption of acting and performance, another characteristic that recalls an avant-garde precedent.24 Soleimani’s employment of performance is most obvious in the Medium of Exchange video, where actors speak long lines and perform actions that unfold over time. But her use on performance can also be seen in her flat photographs and soft sculptures, which employ narrative conventions drawn from cinema, including ritualized expression, gesture, clothing, props and mise en scène. Finally, it can be also seen in an early series of performance photographs made as part of her National Anthem series in which Soleimani posed nude from the waist down wearing a pink hijab, thereby subverting the social and religious functions of the garment (Figure 4.14). Exploring of ‘performance of identity’ practices made famous by postmodern photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura and Carrie Mae Weems, these staged National Anthem performances countered political and religious restraint of the body with sexual display. By throwing off of patriarchal constraint in the most radical fashion possible, these images affirmed female sexuality as a revolutionary force. Although Berlin Dada could be model for Soleimani’s performances – Höch dressed up and performed with dolls – the actions that Soleimani

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FIGURE 4.14 Sheida Soleimani, A Whole New World, 2014. Archival pigment print, 24 × 30 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

stages are more sexualized, and thus recall New York Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose contributions to rethinking identity in the 1910s and 20s could be said to rival that of Marcel Duchamp, with whom she was in close dialogue. As scholars such as Amelia Jones and Irene Gammel have incisively and brilliantly demonstrated, the Baroness practised art in an extreme variety of different media including poetry, painting, drawing, found object sculpture, fashion and, very importantly, through the everyday life performance of a stylized, not-entirely-rational and hypersexual persona.25 As recorded in photographs, paintings and written accounts, von Freytag-Loringhoven played this performative Dadaist character so as to subvert traditional gender roles in a number of different ways: she posed nude; she shaved and shellacked her head; she was promiscuous and sexually aggressive; and she fashioned and wore a series of provocative ensembles that added machined and natural objects to her body (Figure  4.15). And through eroticized performances that linked bodies to machines, the Baroness’s innovative Dada performance practices sought to produce a revolution in everyday life.26 Soleimani’s performances – her own and, more frequently, those of her actors – recall this earlier ephemeral performance art of the Baroness. Not only do they subvert gender through clothing, gesture and action, but they emphasize sexuality, mobilizing it to destabilize the social and political

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FIGURE 4.15 Unknown Photographer, Claude McRay (i.e., McKay) and Baroness v. Freytag (i.e., Von Freytag-Loringhoven), n.d. (before 1924). Digital file from glass negative, 5 × 7 inches or smaller. Library of Congress, Bain News Service, LC-B25677-3 [P&P], LC-DIG-ggbain-33941.

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status quo. In addition, Soleimani’s staging of the human body – which uses photography, photomontage, sculpture and installation to take the body apart and then reform it in a new and more expanded configuration – recalls that of the Baroness in that it consistently links the human form to both machines and nature. As we have seen, Soleimani stages the body by clothing it in a carapace of natural and mechanically reproduced forms: real objects as well as fragments of appropriated photographs of known and anonymous individuals. And it is this permeability of nature with manufacture, as well as the consistent narrative connection of sexuality with revolutionary trauma, that makes Soleimani so fundamentally cyborgian. Like the Baroness, she seems to recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of identity; and even more than the Baroness, Soleimani sees lens-based media as a central matrix through which all identities are produced – and made heterogeneous. Through her reflexive use of performance, photomontage and video, she calls attention to our cyborgian nature, and to the social and political dilemmas that divide our time.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their incisive and helpful comments. I would also like to thank Phong Bui and Charles Schultz of The Brooklyn Rail, where some of my ideas about Soleimani were first developed. Finally, I would also like to express much gratitude to Sheida Soleimani for her openness about her work and thought process over the past four years. Our conversations have meant a lot to me. This essay was first published in History of Photography 43:2 (2019): 169–90, in a special issue, ‘Is Photomontage Over?’, edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón. It is reprinted here with permission. 2 As Gramsci argues, the subaltern classes are defined in relation to dominant or hegemonic groups – governmental as well as corporate bodies – to which they stand in a subordinate relationship of power. ‘The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States.’ As a result, the subaltern always reveals a relationship to dominant political, economic and social powers, either as accommodation or resistance. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 52. 3 Cedar Pasori, ‘This Artist Is Giving Voice To The Plight Of Iranian Women’, The Fader, 26 August 2016, http://www.thefader.com/2016/08/26/sheidasoleimani-interview. See also ‘Sheida Soleimani: “Does someone really want to buy an image of an executed woman and hang it in their home?”’, Studio International, 25 January 2017. As Soleimani related, ‘My parents are both political refugees from Iran. They escaped from the revolution at different times—my dad left in 1983 and my mum in 1986. My dad was a political activist, distributing anti-governmental material, and, because of this, the

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government was basically trying to kill him. He went into hiding for three years, and eventually escaped over the border on horseback. Subsequently, even though my mother wasn’t political at all, she was imprisoned, violated and tortured, as punishment for being with my father. She eventually got out of prison and escaped the country.’ http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ sheida-soleimani-interview-iranian-american-artist-human-rights-abuses-iran. 4 On Soleimani’s National Anthem Series, see ‘Sheida Soleimani’, Aint-Bad, 23 March 2014, http://www.aint-bad.com/article/2014/03/23/sheida-soleimani/; Alexis Lodsun, ‘Sheida Soleimani’s “National Anthem” ’, Juxtapoz, 22 October 2014, https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/photography/sheida-soleimani-snational-anthem/; Genista, ‘Sheida Soleimani Dissects Iranian Politics Through Confrontational “National Anthem” Series’, 2014, http://www.beautifuldecay. com/2014/12/17/sheida-soleimani-dissects-iranian-politics-confrontionalnational-anthem-series/; Mallika Rao, ‘These Twitter-Sourced Collages Paint A Dark Portrait Of Today’s Iran’, 29 January 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost. com/2015/01/29/sheida-soleimani-collages_n_6527596.html; ‘Iranian Political History Through the Eyes of Sheida Soleimani’, Interview with Ege Yorulmaz, http://www.bantmag.com/english/issue/post/40/212. 5 On Soleimani’s process, see Soleimani’s interview with Yamini Nayar, Huffington Post, 13 March 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheidasoleimani/yamini-nayar-interview_b_6977060.html. 6 On Dada photomontage and war trauma, see Brigid Doherty, ‘ “See: We Are All Neurasthenics!” or, The Trauma of Dada Montage’, Critical Inquiry 24:1 (Autumn 1997): 82–132. Doherty productively analyses Berlin Dada in light of neurasthenia, shell shock and Sándor Ferenczi’s writings on war neurosis. See also Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 184–7. Amelia Jones discusses New York Dada’s relation to neurasthenia and war neurosis in Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 7 Studio International, 25 January 2017. 8 Ibid. 9 On To Oblivion and Soleimani’s three-dimensional work, see Gabby Bess, ‘The Artist Making Dolls of the Women Executed in Iran’, Vice, 22 January 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/4xk9kn/the-artist-making-dolls-of-thewomen-executed-in-iran; https://womenintheworld.com/2016/04/18/ confronting-photos-capture-women-the-iranian-government-tried-to-makedisappear/; Kate Sierzputowski, ‘Confronting photos capture women the Iranian government tried to make disappear’, Women in the World, 18 April 2016, https://womenintheworld.com/2016/04/18/confronting-photos-capturewomen-the-iranian-government-tried-to-make-disappear/; Matt Morris, ‘Sheida Soleimani’, Artforum, 2016, https://www.artforum.com/index.php?pn=picks& id=63929&view=print; Anna McNay, ‘Sheida Soleimani: To Oblivion’, Photomonitor, 2017, https://www.photomonitor.co.uk/to-oblivion-2/; Nathalie Olah, ‘The Artist Remembering The Forgotten Tortured Women Of Iran’, Refinery29, 9 February 2017, https://www.refinery29.uk/2017/02/138848/ iranian-artist-torture-victims-sheida-soleimani-interview. 10 The similarities in this context between Soleimani and Steyerl have to do with the image as a substitute for a missing person who may or may not be dead, as

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well as the idea of pixilation and other forms of image degradation as signs of history, labour and trauma. On ‘the poor image’, see Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, in Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 31–45. 11 See A. Bandura and A. C. Huston, ‘Identification as a process of incidental learning’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63:2 (1961): 311–18; and A. Bandura, D. Ross, and S. A. Ross, ‘Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63:3 (1961): 575–82. 12 See Doherty, ‘ “See: We Are All Neurasthenics!” ’, 108–13. 13 See Estrella de Diego et al., Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Avant-Garde Pathways (Málaga: Museo Picasso, 2009), 22, 62–73; Roswitha Mair, Sophie TaeuberArp and the Avant-Garde: A Biography, trans. Damion Searls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 63–4; Andrés Mario Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 111–12; and Maud Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 14–15, 124, 135–7, 212, 222 n. 11. 14 Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Knife, 135–6. 15 On Heartfield’s breakthrough to his mature, more pictorially simplified photomontage practice in the context of his book covers for Malik Verlag between 1920 and 1929, see Andrés Mario Zervigón, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 182–233. As Zervigón notes, in these works, Heartfield borrowed from the narrative conventions of the German film still industry in order to simplify his contemporary reality and allow it to read as part of a larger historical trajectory or story. Like Heartfield, Soleimani draws on narrative techniques that emerged in cinema and photo-illustrated magazines. On the cinematic character of Heartfield’s best-known photomontages, his epic series of mature works for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung during the 1930s, see Sabine T. Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 16 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 146. See also Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 233–7. 17 On Jung, Gross and Die freie Strasse, see Hanne Bergius, Das Lachen Dadas (Giessen: Anabas-Verlag, 1989), 66–89. On Gross’s psychological theories and their influence on Hausmann and Höch, see Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross’ Impact on German Expressionist Writers: Leonard Frank, Franz Jung, Johannes R. Becher, Karl Otten, Curt Corrinth, Walter Hasenclever, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Raoul Hausmann, and Berlin Dada (New York: Peter Lang, 1983), 35–55, 167–75; and Richard Sheppard, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 191–2. See also Roy F. Allen, Literary Life in German Expressionism and the Berlin Circles (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1972), 58, 131, 246.

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18 Or, as Raoul Hausmann characterized Dada identity, ‘Man is simultaneous, a monster of own and alien [Eigen und Fremd], now, before, after, and concurrently—a Buffalo Bill bursting with an Apache Romanticism.’ Raoul Hausmann, ‘Synthetisches Cino der Malerei’, in Michael Erlhoff, ed., Raoul Hausmann, Bilanz der Freierlichkeit, vol. 1 of Texte bis 1933 (Munich: Edition Text u. Kritik, 1982), 15. 19 AIZ 12:27 (13 July 1933), 468–9. 20 On the history of Darwinist and eugenicist thought in Germany since the late 1860s, see Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). On the intellectual grounds of the Nazi State’s negative eugenics polities, see Detlev J. K. Peukert, ‘The Genesis of the “Final Solution” from the Spirit of Science’, in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds, Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 234–52. 21 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October 19 (Winter 1981): 29. 22 Krauss, ‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, 22–3. 23 Official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT5pNJ9_jmM. 24 On Berlin Dada performances, happenings and media hoaxes, see Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 50–64. On how Heartfield and Grosz performed their public identities, see Zervigón, John Heartfield, 66–94. 25 See Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 26 Gammel, Baroness Elsa, 172–3.

CHAPTER FIVE

Black Dada Data: Collage as a Tool of Resistance against White Supremacy Thinking in the Digital Age Sarah Hegenbart

The Black cowgirl – the central figure in in Tschabalala Self’s Pocket Rocket (2020) – fires a handgun, which she holds with her sharpened and manicured fingernails (Figure  5.1).1 The collage comprises denim, fabric, thread and digital print on a canvas, which is partly painted and dyed with acrylic and hand-mixed pigments. The outfit of the central figure (red and blue boots, a red top and a red and blue hat with a single star) alludes to the colours of the Stars and Stripes of the United States. The critical engagement with the Stars and Strips has a long history in African-American art practice, Faith Ringgold’s Flag is Bleeding (1967), David Hammons’s African-American Flag (1990) and Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter) (2018) spring to mind here, and can be read as a ‘searing indictment of America’s inability to fulfil its democratic ideal’.2 Self’s request to demand Black representation in the cultural memory of the United States finds a congenial predecessor in the collages of Romare Bearden (1911–88). In the 1960s, Bearden already challenged white supremacy thinking mirrored in the Western art canon and used the medium of collage to call ‘into question the “truth value” produced by the dominant codes of visual representation in the West’.3 White supremacy, as Robin DiAngelo defines it, ‘does not refer to individual white people and their 105

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FIGURE 5.1 Tschabalala Self, Pocket Rocket, 2020. Digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on dyed canvas, 244 × 244 × 4 cm / 96 × 96 × 1½ in. © Tschabalala Self. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York. Photo: Matt Grubb. individual intentions or actions but to an overarching political, economic, and social system of domination’.4 This study will argue that the medium of collage, and specifically the way in which Black artists have used it, reveals that the distortion of truth in politics has a history that goes far beyond the so-called post-truth era beginning in 2016. While collage historically functioned to critique forms of supremacy thinking, Black artists have employed it to draw attention to the ways in which a society shaped by white supremacy thinking deliberatively ignores and rejects the value of Black experience. I will explore whether the internet, which could be viewed as collage in its own right, facilitates new modes of resistance; for example, the formation of transnational political movements such as #BlackLivesMatter; or whether it contributed to the rise of the altright, which Jessie Daniels describes as ‘both a continuation of a centuries old

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dimension of racism in the U.S. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms’.5 Transferring the Eurocentric notion of collage, which is closely tied to the Dada movement, to the Black experience may be problematic in its own right as it potentially sets up a hierarchy between the original collage and the ways in which Black artists have appropriated Dada forms.6 As the idea of fragmenting conventional images, norms and belief systems is inherent of the nature of collage, my conviction is that the notion of collage invites and thrives on continuous modification rather than viewing this as inferior form if compared with the historical original.

‘Post-truth’ as sign for the unwillingness to abandon white privilege Self’s collaged cowgirl hints at the failed representation of people of colour within the strands of narration that are constitutive for democracies not only in the United States but in the Global North more broadly. While I am focusing on race relations in the US context here, this mechanism of political suppression occurs in numerous countries. In Neither Settler nor Native, Mahmood Mamdani demonstrates how the settler myth still shapes ‘institutional realities that perpetuate a colonial occupation’ in countries ranging from the United States to Germany and South Africa.7 Michael Hanchard draws attention to the fact that race is still tied to ‘political inequality’ as it leads to ‘deliberate decisions to exclude specific groups from participation in a polity’.8 The experience of failed representation through democratic institutions has a long history in representational democracy as Philip Manow shows.9 Adopting Colin Crouch’s concept of post-democracy, Felix Stalder describes the negative consequence of digitalization as increasing the gap between technocratic institutions within which major decisions are made and the impact of civil participation in these decisions.10 The experience of not feeling represented does not only apply to people who are in fact disproportionally represented within democratic institutions. More recently, an increasing number of white people (‘white’ is used as political term here and refers to those benefiting from white privilege) also claimed that they were governed by dubious elites and demanded that their concerns feature more prominently within political decision-making. Populist politicians in numerous countries have capitalized on their concerns and employed the possibilities of digital communication – Donald Trump’s notorious tweets might spring to mind here – to influence and manipulate the masses. Rather than focusing on how digital images can be used to address the anxieties of not being represented, my starting point is a different one. I assume that the phenomena characteristic for an era fashionably labelled as ‘post-truth’ range far beyond the Trump presidency.11 The strategy of dismissing facts contradicting one’s own political orientation as ‘fake news’ stands in the tradition of European colonization and white settler colonialism which

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disqualified the epistemic system of Indigenous people to justify the ways in which they brutally ruled over those people. With his notorious tweets, Trump therefore highlighted a pattern that has influenced the structuring of society since the beginning of settler colonialism: white supremacy.12 Self invokes the topos of the white settler colony – a topos that excludes Black people and the Indigenous population from the founding narrative of the United States.13 The frontier myth is tied to white supremacy thinking, which strongly resurfaced after the 2016 election that marked the end of the presidency of Barack Obama. According to the frontier myth, white settlers of European descent made the United States habitable through expansion and their fight on the frontier against ‘savages’. Being far from true, the frontier myth entirely ignores the histories of the Indigenous people and the contribution of Black people whose body and labour was enslaved and exploited to cultivate the land. As Lee McIntyre pointed out, post-truth functions as a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is a good evidence for it or not. And this is the recipe for political domination.14 The frontier myths forms part of the ideology of white supremacists employed to dominate the Black population. In The White Album (2018), a video collage of digitally sourced material, Arthur Jafa revealed the perverse influence white supremacy thinking still exerts on the (online) culture within the United States. While ‘post-truth’ could therefore be viewed as labelling an era, in which the anxiety to lose one’s white privilege results in declaring everything potential threat to this privilege as ‘fake news’, Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann and Curtis Sullivan underlined that recent post-truth criticism has ‘efface[d] the epistemological, ontological, and axiological danger experienced by people of color throughout American history’.15 They therefore consider ‘post-truth’ as tainted by ‘racial amnesia’, which has led to the misinformed belief that an agreement on what counts as truth once existed within a society. 16 It seems as if Self’s Black cowgirl reclaims her agency and the right to her own narrative with the act of shooting. Both were denied to her twofold – as a woman and as a Black person. At the same time, the loose touch on the handgun indicates a preference in which the gun would not have to operate as extension of the body in order to protect it. The way in which she loosely grips or rather gently touches the handgun intimates reluctance against the act of violence, which does not actually ‘fit’ her. It could be an act of selfdefence within a racist and misogynist environment. It could also be an act of self-assertion in a white supremacist society, which does not acknowledge the Black woman as part of its own history. Along similar lines, Skunder Bogossian, a US-based artist of Armenian-Ethiopian descent, already drew attention to the void in the frontier myth in his Cowboy (U.S.A) in 1972.17

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Self’s subject evokes parallels to the aims of #BlackLivesMatter, the political movement founded to fight expressions of white supremacy that still renders the Black body vulnerable to state violence and murder motivated by racism. In contrast to previous Black liberation movements, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, ‘the face of the Black Lives Matter movement is largely queer and female’.18 Another reference point for Pocket Rocket could be the murder of the 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson, who was killed by the 35-year-old police office Aaron Dean in her own home in Fort Worth in Texas. The art critic of the New Yorker, Hilton Als, suggests: ‘Self may be making a statement here about the Black female body as a target for all sorts of violence.’19 In doing so, Self belongs to a group of Black artists who use the medium of collage to reshuffle historical narratives in order include historical facts of ‘Black America’.20 This attempt to rearrange patterns of hierarchy within a society reveals historical parallels to the avant-garde movement of Dada, whose beginning can be traced back to 1916. A hundred years before the 2016 election, Dada employed the aesthetic sphere as realm of resistance against a war-obsessed, male-dominated and nationalistic society. Their wide-ranging countercultural strategies included an ironic engagement with themselves and the people (especially people in power) around them, a humorous rearrangement of text and image parts, transgression of bourgeois etiquette and gender norms, fragmentation of images, the rejection of ‘high culture’, appropriation of inexpensive everyday material such as newspapers, the collage of cut-out material to create novel relations between different image parts and absurd performances. While scholars such as Angela Nagle have argued that these strategies of the left avant-garde are now most successfully employed by the alt-right to fight their online culture wars, I am concerned that such an interpretation misses out the force of resistance against supremacist structures that is inherent to Dada.21 Therefore, I will explore how Dada strategies are used as mode of resistance to white supremacist thinking. A comparison of three different types of collage – historical Dada collage, collage employed during the Civil Rights movement in the United States and collage in the digital age – will serve in development of my argument that collage operates as an agonistic public sphere. Chantal Mouffe introduced the idea of the agonistic public sphere, as a sphere ‘of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted’.22 According to Mouffe, the era of posttruth politics is due to a loss of the agonistic public sphere, which has been replaced by the demand for consensus in neoliberal politics.23 Even though Mouffe does not explicitly say so, I contend that this consensus is coined by white supremacy thinking. The Dada aesthetics as expressed in the medium of collage facilitates such an agonistic public sphere on which an exchange of divergent perspectives stimulates an ongoing dialogue which cannot be resolved in a singular outcome, and therefore challenges the hegemony of the white perspective. I will label the collage operating as such an agonistic public sphere ‘dialogical image’.

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Collage strategies and political resistance The notion of collage subsumes a range of terms, which feature centrally in the Dada movement, e.g. ‘photomontage’ or ‘assemblage’. Herta Wescher traces the history of collage before Dada back to medieval crafts, folk art, cubism, futurism, expressionism and constructivism.24 Specific to Dada is the invention of photomontage. Whether it was invented by George Grosz, John Heartfield or the then couple Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann remains controversial.25 In all scenarios though, the invention of photomontage emerged as a form of resistance to a political situation. In what follows, I will particularly focus on Hannah Höch’s concept of collage, as Höch continued working in this medium even after the Dada period.26 Recently, her work has become an inspiration for artists in the Black diaspora, e.g. Wangechi Mutu, who ‘admire[s] Höch’s work and simple process’ due to ‘powerful images that strike chords embedded deep in the reservoirs of our subconscious’.27 Höch describes collage as ‘all-embracing word’ that ‘predominantly refers to a newly created entity, made from alienating components’.28 In 1919, Höch’s Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany) (Plate 1), a comparatively large collage with a height of 114 cm and a width of 90 cm, brought the male dominated beer-belly culture in Weimar Germany to the forefront.29 While the body of the headless dancer Niddy Impekoven juggling the head of Käthe Kollwitz forms the centre of the collage, the dimension of the pair is small compared to the male heads looking at the viewer from the upper part of the collage, among them the last German emperor Wilhelm II whose forehead is covered by the lettering ‘Die anti dadaistische Bewegung’ (in English: ‘The anti-dadaist movement’) cut out from four different newspapers. The dense section on the upper right combines various (mainly male) portraits with parts from industrial engines, wheels, modern high-rise buildings, and recent inventions such as the aircraft. In contrast, the lower part comprises several cut-outs from crowds of people above which three enormous wheels are placed as if to indicate that it is the anonymous mass facilitating the industrialization which benefits only the powerful few. The upper-left corner portraits Dadaists, such as Raoul Hausmann whose arms are depicted as sausages. The cut-out letterings ‘Die große dada WELT’ and ‘DADAiSten’ indicate clearly who forms an opposition to the beer-belly culture. In Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser, Höch debunks a male-dominated culture in which militarism, authoritarianism and patriarchal values feature centrally. In the current situation of movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter which are dominantly female-led, Höch’s work has received new interest, as she attacked the (white) male gaze, sexism and gender stereotypes and engaged with art from the Global South in her series From an Ethnographic Museum. The series comprises about ‘eighteen to twenty works’ created between 1924 and 1930.30 Maud Lavin summarizes the purpose of this series as follows:

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The series’ primary referent is not race, however, but the way race is socially encoded in the ethnographic museum. What concerned Höch in these works is the display of culture marked as different – for the Other as well as the self in Höch’s photomontages is the European woman.31 Let us have a closer look at Die Süße (The Sweet One), which belongs to this series (Figure 5.2).32 This collage applied on a background painted in watercolour is dated to 1926; a time in which Germany no longer possessed colonies but in which the Ethnological Museum experienced increased popularity.33 The

FIGURE 5.2 Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (Aus einem ethnographischen Museum) (The Sweet One [From an Ethnographic Museum]), 1926. Collage with watercolour © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021.

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Ethnological Museum, as space in which non-European objects where exhibited as trophies ranging from Germany’s time as a colonial power, helped to re-experience a feeling of (white) supremacy over supposedly primitive, simple and exotic image traditions and sculptures.34 The figure of Die Süße consists of three main parts, namely a head based on a photograph of a mask from the area of the former French Congo, which Höch found in the Der Queerschnitt No. 4 (1924), a body that belongs to an idol figure of the Bushongo, which was published in Der Queerschnitt No. 5 (1925), and the legs of a white women potentially cut out from the Berliner Illustrierte Höch frequently used for her collages.35 The legs evoke the impression that the figure is running away from her position – the position of being objectified as exotic entity in the Ethnographic Museum or the position of being objectified as a woman. While Maud Lavin and Maria Makela disagree on the extent of Höch’s feminism transpiring through this series, it cannot be denied that Höch felt empathy with those objectified as exotic others as she felt that she experienced discrimination (while in a different form) as a woman.36 What is striking about Die Süße is ‘the active gaze of the right eye’ of the mask which Höch replaced with the eye of a white woman.37 Denise Toussaint points out how this eye turns the submissive figure into a rebellious one.38 The submissive impression of the figure is evoked by an added left white hand, which is opened very loosely as if it were too weak for a firm grip. This gesture resembles the Black woman in Pocket Rocket. It seems as if Höch’s Süße shifts between the roles of the rebellious woman and the submissive co-perpetrator. The way in which Höch ‘gave viewers room for complex, ambiguous emotional responses’ stands in opposition to the propagandistic image, which targets a clear response.39 In How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley describes ‘fascist politics as a politics of white hierarchy’.40 In contrast to the aesthetics of fascism, Höch’s collages are ‘anti-hierarchical’ and promote ‘the equal value of different cultural manifestations’.41 Höch’s image is dialogical in its nature and operates in the sense of an agonistic public sphere. While Höch most likely lacked, as Makela remarks, a ‘postcolonial consciousness fully cognizant of the underlying racism that informed such representations’, it seems as if Höch wants to safeguard the non-European sculptures from a white gaze that fails to grasp their full meaning. 42 Höch, as Maud Lavin argues, ‘laid the foundation for a critique of racism, even if she did not pursue it further’.43 Therefore, it is not surprising that her work would later influence the African-American artist Romare Bearden who employed the agonistic potential of collage to the Black experience.

Black collage Having previously worked in abstraction, Bearden turned to the medium of collage in 1964, the year in which the Civil Rights Act marked the official

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end of segregation. This was tied to Bearden’s increasing political engagement as co-founder of the Spiral Group.44 Even though the Dada artist George Grosz was among Bearden’s teachers, it was particularly the collage technique of Hannah Höch, according to Kobena Mercer, that strongly influenced Bearden.45 While Höch focused on the supremacy of the male beer-belly culture and demanded a place for discriminated and fetishized women, Bearden utilized the medium of collage to engage with the AfricanAmerican situation in the United States and explored ways to integrate narratives of the African-American experience into the historiography of the United States. While Bearden experimented with collage ‘as early as 1952’, the escalation of police violence against peaceful African-American protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963 documented in numerous press photographs caused many Black artists to draw from these photographs in their artistic practice.46 Mickalene Thomas’s collage Resist (2017) brings out how prominently this historical protest still features in the cultural memory. Bearden’s The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism (1964), a work from his Photomontage Projections, uses the photostat technique to ‘translate from one medium to another as well as to study the work of masters’ (Figure 5.3).47

FIGURE 5.3 Romare H. Bearden, The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, 1964. Collage; Photomechanical reproductions, paint, and graphite on board, 23.2 × 30.5 cm. © Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021).

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The collage depicts a group oriented towards a figure in the centre whose body appears to be made out of a wooden shape, which is reminiscent of the body of Höch’s Süße. The figure whose Black face is partly covered by a supposedly African mask wears a red robe. Bearden cites ‘Zurburan’ [sic] as reference point for the rendering of the robe.48 While Bearden himself does not mention a specific work, Lee Stephens Glazer shows that he could refer to Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Virgin of the Carthusians (1655).49 Glazer argues: In Projections Bearden willfully appropriated works by old masters, taking possession of their compositions and revising them as pictorial paces for African American creative activity.50 Apart from the woman on the right side, the rest of the figures all appear to be male. Their heads are constituted from fragments ranging from African masks to photographs. Compared with other body parts, their hands are overemphasized. The gesture of the hands directed towards the central figure evokes a certain movement and conveys the specific importance that the central figure possesses. The group appears to stand in a river, which hints towards the practice of outdoor baptism in Southern parts of the United States. As Ralph Ellison points out, Bearden’s imagery is inspired by his ‘Southern childhood and Northern upbringing’.51 The train in the background, a symbol that recurs in Bearden’s collages, is not only a biographical reference to Bearden’s personal move from the South to the North, but it also alludes to the Great Migration of African Americans who left the South, where the Jim Crow Laws enforcing racial segregation were upheld until 1965. In addition, the train calls attention to the role of the railway within the colonization of the United States. It therefore relates to Self’s critical engagement with the frontier myth. Bearden stated that the train in Baptism ‘represents the encroachment of another culture’.52 The idea of a culture encroaching could be meant twofold. It could repeat the prejudice of white supremacists that the Black culture is distorting the white culture, but it could also allude to the way in which whites appropriated Black culture. Bearden’s collage interrupts such an essentialist approach to culture by operating like a dialogical image. Bearden instead seems to be interested in the ‘back-and-forth dialectic set in motion when artworks talk to one another’.53 This dialogue of works challenges the ways in which ‘whiteness arrogates universality on account of an unmarked or anonymous existence that equates with a subject position of mastery, blackness is fixed into the field of vision primarily as an object for the gaze’.54 Therefore, it is not surprising that Kobena Mercer describes Bearden’s work as central to diaspora aesthetics.55 I believe that it is this ‘dialogic forms of Afro-diaspora modernisms’ that resonates in Black Dada collage exemplifying the dialogical image.56

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Black Dada Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada project expands on Bearden’s quest for the representation of the Black experience in the art canon coined by white supremacy thinking. In a similar manner to Bearden, Pendleton scrutinizes the aesthetic strategies of classical works from the art canon. In Black Dada (A/A) (2019), sleek black paintings with minimal letters invoke the tradition of Sol LeWitt, a conceptual artist whose sculptures were mostly monochrome, often literally white (Figure 5.4). Pendleton, as Thomas

FIGURE 5.4 Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (A/A), 2019. Silkscreen ink on canvas, in two panels, overall: 243.8 × 192.7 cm; 96 × 75⅞ in, each panel: 121.9 × 192.7 cm; 48 × 75⅞ in. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler.

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Haakenson emphasizes, ‘exposes the gaps, the absences, the aporias in LeWitt’s conceptual sculptures to reveal the inherent, albeit unthought and unacknowledged, influences of black culture’.57 LeWitt made only one political work, namely Black Form, for the Skulptur Projekte Münster exhibit in 1987. The sculpture built of blocks of aerated concrete was painted black and was supposed to form a contrast to the White Pyramid. Yet Black Form did not refer to the Black experience, but formed a memorial for the missing Jews.58 Pendleton’s emphasis that Black culture is entirely left out from the white art canon even if alluded to also resonates in his Black Dada reader, which is based on a series of photocopies of texts of which most engage with the Black experience. Pendleton references Amiri Baraka’s poem Black Dada Nihilismus, which was published in the collection The Dead Lecturer: Poems in 1964. Baraka declared those integrationist attempts, which artists such as Bearden still appeared to believe in, as unsuccessful. As Black people were fully excluded from official, professional and cultural institutions back then, Baraka demanded the elimination of this world in order to make a Black world and a Black aesthetic possible. Black Dada Nihilismus (Baraka uses the German term here) therefore is necessarily violent as it is based on the destruction of the world: Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats. Black Dada, Pendleton intimates, implements Dada’s challenge to conventional art. While white Dada’s avant-gardism is just a gesture as it has already been institutionalized, Black Dada really does create a new future by eradicating the institutional boundaries (e.g. white supremacy).59 As John Gillespie puts it: Black Dada Nihilismus as aesthetic modality of production operates to produce and work toward the end of the world [. . .] in order to bring about the creation of new worlds, of Black worlds.60 In his Black Dada project, Pendleton questions the Eurocentric orientation of Dada and confronts the viewer with Black images instead. Associating himself with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Pendleton designed the Black Dada Flag (2018) symbolizing how digital networks could awaken a novel potential of resistance to Black exclusion. Haakenson argues: In#BlackLivesMatter, Pendleton found a political and social companion to his own artistic efforts to examine the unacknowledged appropriation and artistic erasure of black cultural contributions to art and art theory in their historical and contemporary forms.61

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This suggests that the digital realm might provide a platform of resistance operating as an agonistic public sphere on which mainstream discourses can be rewritten and mainstream narratives coined by white supremacy, such as the frontier myth, can be challenged.

Black Dada Data The binary character of the digital initially appears to conflict with the agonistic nature of a public sphere on which multiple voices negotiate with each other since it enforces, as Nelly Y. Pinkrah observes, ‘the Enlightenment way of constructing everything as binary oppositions—nature/ culture, human/machine, Black/white, master/slave (the latter terminology is used in informatics and software engineering, by the way), and more’.62 However, the affordance of the digital consisting in the creation of networks hints towards another aspect of the digital; an aspect, in which it resembles the functioning of collage.63 Similarly to the ways in which collage creates novel relations between different visual fragments representing different parts of society, the digital could operate as a sphere for a Black counter-public. Catherine R. Squires even suggests to ‘speak of multiple Black public spheres constituted by groups that share a common racial makeup but perhaps do not share the same class, gender, ethnic, or ideological standpoints’.64 If social media, as Hannah Black argues, ‘has made possible networked uprisings and drawn together disparate struggles toward horizons of reform, revolution, identity, or survival’, it operates as a counter-public.65 Black also draws attention to the downside to it as the mass of social data accumulated ‘has provided a new vector for acts of violence as old as the state: surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, etc.’66 Black’s argument evokes parallels to Shoshana Zuboff’s notion of ‘surveillance capitalism’ which is ‘antidemocratic and antiegalitarian’ in its nature.67 While Zuboff does not examine the impact of surveillance capitalism on the Black experience, Simone Browne explores links between race and surveillance, which she traces back to the transatlantic slave trade.68 In Digital Diaspora, Anna Everett concentrates on how the digital turn impacted on Black participation and the emergence of new Black public spheres.69 Everett argues that an implication of the rhetoric of the ‘digital divide’, which highlights the ‘distressing fact of unequal technology distribution’, is that Black people are associated with the ‘digitally disadvantaged’.70 In order to highlight the historical achievements of Black digital pioneers and to counter the whiteness of the internet, Everett draws attention to a group which she labels ‘Afrogeeks’ – among them Philip Emeagwali and Anita Brown.71 She argues that the institutional discrimination of Black scientists and ‘the invisibility of Afrogeeks in our society’s high-tech imaginary’ are due to the power of white supremacist stereotypes of Black

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people that deny them intellectual capacities.72 Even though Everett’s book was published before the emergence of #BLM, she links the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 to his ‘technophilia’ and his accomplished use of the internet and digital tools such as YouTube.73 More recently, the global impact of the #BLM movement may suggest that the internet resembles collage in its functioning as an agonistic public sphere in order to highlight positions marginalized by supremacy thinking. In this process, the digital enables the quick and broad dissemination of images, such as photographs documenting police violence against Black people, which would otherwise have been confined to relatively small and local public spheres. Similarly to collage incorporating images from everyday reality, the digital provides a platform for critique of social circumstances. Kahlil Joseph’s video collage BLKNWS (2019) exemplifies how this agonistic Black counter-sphere could operate. BLKNWS is a constantly updated archive of news and historical footage representing Black culture. Joseph thus debunks the racial biases leading to a lack of Black narratives in the Global North. He also attacks the ‘news-industrial complex’, which describes ‘news addiction powered by corporate digital platforms on networked devices’.74 Joseph shows how the digital as Black counter-sphere could open epistemic categories and canonical thinking shaped by white supremacy, as it brings in a multitude of images into the conversation which would have been supressed by institutional forces. It resembles Dada collage in the way in which it bursts established categories and forms of thinking. Moreover, the way in which the digital allows, e.g. through hashtags in Instagram or through the invention of memes, to create novel relations between text and image proves its potential for ‘multivocality and dialogicality’.75 This suggests that the digital could provide a platform for dialogical images and operate as an agonistic public sphere. However, wellestablished mechanisms, such as the institution of white supremacy, impede this from happening.76 How these white supremacist prejudices are reinforced by racist algorithms is the focus of Safiya Noble’s research on Algorithms of Oppression.77 She provides numerous examples of the racist operations of search engines that occlude Black knowledge and reinforce white supremacist stereotypes instead. Therefore, it is not surprising that Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of #BLM, emphasizes: ‘You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Hashtags do not start movements – people do.’78 The digital appears as a double-edged sword. It possesses the potential to strengthen already existing networks of resistance by allowing them to connect online on a global scale. However, as Noble and Browne’s studies on racist algorithms and surveillance bring out, the internet is driven by white supremacy thinking denying equal representation to people of colour. The commodification of the public sphere further prevents dialogical interaction in the process of creating new networks. Digitalization, as the German sociologist Armin Nassehi argues, is directly related to already existing structures in society, which the digital makes more visible.79

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Consequently, the fight for Black liberation and against the dominance of white supremacy thinking cannot only be fought online, but requires institutional change.

Conclusion This essay has shown how collage’s functioning as agonistic public sphere can be employed by Black artists to fight against structures of white supremacy impeding the representation of the Black experience in societal discourses. I have argued that the institution of white supremacy rejects perspectives that do not align with the dominant white narrative. As Self’s Pocket Rocket shows, this mainstream narrative excludes a multitude of perspectives, e.g. the perspective of the Black woman. Therefore, the denial of truth(s) that could potentially endanger white supremacy can be traced back far beyond the post-truth. While Self challenges us to think about a failure of ‘truth’ in the past and present, she also encourages us to hope that ‘truth’ might be possible again in the future. In 2019, she participated in the Beyond the Black Atlantic exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover, where she employed the notion of the avatar to refer to a digital sphere ‘as a key site of interpersonal (“digital”) encounter where concepts of identities, body ideals and also stereotypes are shaped’.80 Her collaged avatars are inspired by the idea to freely choose one’s identity.81 To make such a free choice possible for everyone, white supremacy needs to be attacked and countered. Collage providing an agonistic public sphere can be utilized as a mean to do so.

Notes 1 The attribute ‘Black’ will be capitalized throughout this essay to underline that it is a political term originating in resistance to discrimination. 2 Kobena Mercer, Travel & See. Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2016), 239. Mercer mentions Ringgold and Hammons here. 3 Kobena Mercer, ‘Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen’, in Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2005), 124–45, here p. 145. 4 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (London: Allen Lane 2019), 28. See also Charles W. Mills, ‘White Supremacy as Sociopolitical System: A philosophical perspective’, in Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds, White out: The Continuing Significance of Racism (New York/London: Routledge, 2003), 35–48, here p. 42. 5 Jessie Daniels, ‘The algorithmic rise of the “alt-right” ’, in Contexts 17:1 (2018): 60–5, here p. 64. See also Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White

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Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Plymouth, MA : Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 6 Many thanks to Eva Bentcheva who raised this point and suggested to call this act a ‘decolonial translation’. 7 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native. The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2020), 85. 8 Michael George Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 6. 9 See Philip Manow, (Ent-)Demokratisierung der Demokratie. Ein Essay (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), 47. 10 See Felix Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 209. 11 While Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou similarly argue that democracy and truth have been separate concepts for a while, they do not specifically relate this phenomenon to white supremacy thinking, see Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (New York/London: Routledge, 2020). 12 Numerous tweets expressing white supremacist sentiments could be mentioned here, e.g. his retweet of a video showing white supremacists shouting ‘white power’ in June 2020. 13 See John Gabriel, Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), 43. 14 Lee C. McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2018), 13. 15 Robert Mejia, Kay Beckermann and Curtis Sullivan, ‘White lies: a racial history of the (post)truth’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15:2 (2018): 109–26, here p. 113. 16 Mejia et al., ‘White lies’, 111. 17 See also John Peffer, ‘The Diaspora as Object’, in Laurie Ann Farell, ed., Looking Both Ways. Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (New York: Museum for African Art, 2003), 22–36, here p. 26. 18 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 165. 19 Hilton Als,‘Tschabalala Self’, New Yorker, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/ goings-on-about-town/art/tschabalala-self (13.01.2021). 20 Tschabalala Self uses the term ‘Black America’ in this video: https://epviewingroom.exhibit-e.art/viewing-room/tschabalala-self#tab-1:slideshow;tab2:slideshow;slide-1:1 (13.01.2021). 21 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies. The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2018), 53. 22 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. See also Chantal Mouffe, ‘Which Public Sphere for a Democratic Society?’, in Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 99 (2002): 55–65, here p. 58.

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23 See Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London/New York: Verso, 2018), 93. 24 Cf. Herta Wescher, Die Collage: Geschichte eines künstlerischen Ausdrucksmittels (Köln: DuMont Schauberg, 1968). 25 Cf. Dawn Ades, “Hannah Höch, Dada and the ‘New Woman” ’, in Dawn Ades, Emily Butler and Daniel Herrmann, eds, Hannah Höch. Exhibition Catalogue (London/Munich: Prestel, 2014), 18–29, here p. 27 n. 7. 26 Cf. Wescher, Die Collage, 152. 27 Wangechi Mutu in conversation with Lauri Firstenberg quoted from Brett M. Van Hoesen, ‘Performing the Culture of Weimar Postcolonialism: Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum and Its Legacy’, in Ades et al., eds, Hannah Höch, 78–87, here p. 86. 28 Hannah Höch, ‘On Collage’, in Ades et al., eds, Hannah Höch, 16. This text originally appeared as Hannah Höch, “Zur Collage”, in Hannah Höch. Collagen aus den Jahren 1916–1971. Exhibition Catalogue (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1971), 18–19. 29 See Jula Dech, Hannah Höch. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 25. 30 Maud Lavin, ‘The Mess of History, or the Unclean Hannah Höch’, in Ades et al., eds, Hannah Höch, 88–95, here p. 89. This text originally appeared in a slightly altered version in Catherine Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (Boston/Cambridge, MA : Institute for Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1996), 89. 31 Maud Lavin, ‘Hannah Höch’s From an ethnographic museum’, in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1998), 330–-59, here p. 352. 32 Veronika Träger’s diploma thesis, ‘Hannah Höchs allegorische Klebebilder: Zur Repräsentationstechnik der Fotomontage in Höchs Serie „Aus einem ethnographischen Museum“’ at the University of Vienna, 2008, (https://core. ac.uk/download/pdf/11581917.pdf) and Stella Maria Gatto’s master’s thesis,‘New cuts, dark continents : Hannah Höch’s “From an Ethnographic Museum” ’ at the University of British Columbia, 2018, (https://open.library. ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0371233) entail insightful discussions of Die Süße. 33 See also Coco Fusco, ‘Deaccessioning Empire’, New York Review of Books, 25 February 2021, 23–5. 34 Dan Hicks emphasizes the link between the Ethnological Museum and white supremacy thinking very clearly, see Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums. The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Books, 2020), 15. 35 See Maria Makela, ‘Die Süße’, in Janet Jenkins, ed., The photomontages of Hannah Höch. Exhibition Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996), 104. 36 See Ralf Burmeister, ‘Ars una or the synthesis of the disparate. On Hannah Höch’s collage series Aus einem ethnografischen Museum’, in Ralf Burmeister,

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Michaela Oberhofer and Esther Tisa Francini, eds, Dada Africa. Dialogue with the Other. Exhibition Catalogue (Zurich/Berlin: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016), 184–90, here p. 190 n. 10. 37 Denise Toussaint, Dem Kolonialen Blick Begegnen (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015), 150 (my translation). 38 See Toussaint, Dem Kolonialen Blick Begegnen, 150. 39 Lavin, ‘Unclean Hannah Höch’, 89. 40 Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. (New York: Random House, 2018), 13. 41 Burmeister, ‘Hannah Höch’s collage series’, 189. 42 Maria Makela, ‘By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context’, in Jenkins, ed., The photomontages of Hannah Höch, 49–79, here p. 71. 43 Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 44 See Carroll Greene, ‘Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual’, in Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 3–4, here p. 4. 45 Mercer, ‘Romare Bearden, 1964’, 124–45, here p. 145. 46 Mary Schmidt Campbell, An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 212. 47 Campbell, An American Odyssey, 212. 48 Romare Bearden, ‘Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings’, Leonardo 2:1 (1969): 11–19, here p. 15. 49 Lee Stephens Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity: Art and Race in Romare Bearden’s Projections’, The Art Bulletin 76:3 (1994): 411–26, here p. 417. Glazer dates the work to circa 1625, but the Seville Museum of Fine Arts to whose collection the work belongs dates it to 1655; see http://www.spainisculture. com/en/obras_de_excelencia/museo_de_bellas_artes_de_sevilla/la_virgen_de_ las_cuevas.html (24.02.2021). 50 Glazer, ‘Signifying Identity’, 17. 51 Ralph Ellison, ‘The Art of Romare Bearden’, The Massachusetts Review 18:4 (1977): 673–80, here p. 680. 52 Bearden, ‘My Montage Paintings’, 15. 53 Mercer, Travel & See, 238–9. 54 Ibid., 243. 55 Ibid., 234. 56 Ibid., 243. 57 Thomas O. Haakenson, ‘1968, Now and Then: Black Lives, Black Bodies’, Cultural Critique 103 (2019): 75–83, here p. 79. 58 See Eckhard Kluth, ‘Sol LeWitt’, Skulptur Projekte Archiv, https://www. skulptur-projekte-archiv.de/en-us/1987/projects/54/ (08.03.2021). 59 See Caroline Levine, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 27.

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60 John Gillespie, ‘Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic’, Critical Ethnic Studies 4:2 (Fall 2018): 100–17, here p. 113. 61 Haakenson, ‘Black Lives, Black Bodies’, 79. 62 Nelly Y. Pinkrah, ‘The Digital Has Been Around for a While’, C&, 7 July 2020, https://contemporaryand.com/fr/magazines/the-digital-has-been-around-for-awhile/ (08.03.2021). 63 Caroline Levine describes ‘affordance’ as a term ‘used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs’; see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6. 64 Catherine R. Squires, ‘Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres’, Communication Theory 12:4 (2002): 446–68, here p. 452. 65 Hannah Black,‘Social Life’, Texte zur Kunst No. 98, June 2015, https://www. textezurkunst.de/98/soziales-leben/ (08.03.2021). 66 Ibid., n.a. 67 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019), 513. 68 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2015), 11. 69 See also Michael C. Dawson,‘A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics’, in The Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., The Black Public Sphere. A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 199–227; and Squires,‘Rethinking the Black Public Sphere’. 70 Anna Everett, Digital Diaspora. A Race for Cyberspace (New York: SUNY Press, 2009), 149. See also Nelly Y. Pinkrah, ‘Programmierte Ungleichheit’, Neues Deutschland, 14 February 2020, https://www.neues-deutschland.de/ artikel/1132898.algorithmen-programmierte-ungleichheit.html (08.03.2021). 71 Everett, Digital Diaspora, 152. 72 Ibid., 156. 73 Ibid., 199–202. How the Trump campaign later hijacked the technological knowledge from the Obama campaign is described in detail by Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie in his MINDF*CK. Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World (London: Profile Books, 2020). 74 Anonymous, ‘BLKNWS’, Sundance Institute, https://www.sundance.org/ projects/blknws (08.03.2021). 75 Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, ‘#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States’, American Ethnologist 42:(1 (2015): 4–17, here p. 7. 76 See Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 10. 77 Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press), 2018.

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78 Alicia Garza, The purpose of power: How we come together when we fall apart (New York: One World, 2020), xi. 79 See Armin Nassehi, Muster. Theorie der digitalen Gesellschaft (Munich: Beck, 2019), 18. 80 Sergey Harutoonian, ‘Beyond Identity-Political Attributions. An Introduction to the Exhibition Beyond the Black Atlantic’, in Sergey Harutoonian and Angela Lautenbach, eds, Beyond the Black Atlantic. Exhibition Catalogue (Hanover: Kunstverein Hannover, 2020), 11–15, here p. 14. 81 See Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, ‘Tschabalala Self’s Avatars of Black Womanhood’, Hyperallergic, Art Interview, 4 March 2019, https:// hyperallergic.com/487120/tschabalala-selfs-avatars-of-black-womanhood/ (08.03.2021).

CHAPTER SIX

Dada’s African South Roger van Wyk

As a young artist and activist in South Africa during the 1980s, I witnessed the radical inspiration of Dada on the aesthetic practices of South African artists resisting apartheid (1948–90). We identified particularly with German Dada’s oppositional role during the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic (1918– 33) and adopted such Dada strategies as photomontage, assemblage, humour and parody to attack the white supremacist ideology of Christian Nationalism. This experience led me to initiate the exhibition Dada South?: Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance, Dada legacies in South African art from 1960 to the present, with co-curators Kathryn Smith and Lerato Bereng. Our project produced an exhibition in 2009–10 at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town that put on show over 400 works, and was accompanied by an international symposium. We selected key works of historical Dada art, artefacts and publications, loaned from museums in Berlin, Paris and Zurich, to place in dialogue with South African artworks, films, performances and underground publications. The exhibition demonstrated how the anti-art stance and strategies developed in earlytwentieth-century Dada practices resonated with apartheid-era South African artists who similarly rejected art’s traditional roles the better to confront and subvert the oppressive apartheid regime, the hypocrisy of Calvinist sexual repression and racism. The first part of this essay explores how Dada’s rejection of European rationalist philosophy attracted South African artists who wished to challenge apartheid. The Dada South? exhibition helped demonstrate how a renewed global interest in Dada after World War II in Europe and the United States inspired South African Neo-Dada aesthetic practices from the early 1960s. The Neo-Dada turn towards performative practice found some fertile ground amid the political turmoil of South Africa during the liberation struggle and 125

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transition to democracy. But it is in the period beyond the 1994 election, particularly after the post-democracy euphoria of the Rainbow Nation phase had faded, that protest against the failure of the once-revolutionary African National Congress (ANC) as the new ruling party to deliver on its promises of fundamental change, economic empowerment and decolonization shifted the critique from among a new generation of artists, outdoors and into new media, especially into live performances in public spaces. A generation born free of apartheid have taken to protest ongoing inequality and the lack of institutional transformation through direct action. Live art has proliferated in public space – inviting the public to critically engage with issues of colonial heritage and postcolonial reparations. This essay outlines this shift in strategies of art production beyond the gallery, and suggests that the current situation reflects not a break with Dada traditions but a continuation. Although conditions in our networked digital world are vastly changed, the problems of nationalism and militarism opposed by Dada have intensified in recent decades. In an ironic twist of history the alt-right has harnessed the power of the irrational, adopting fake news to destabilize and destroy in order to rebuild in their own image.1 In South Africa’s young democracy, rampant corruption and fake news have also obscured the political territory so nobody knows who to believe or whom to trust, benefiting only predatory elites capable of exploiting the chaos for their own gain.2 The second part of the essay focuses on the issue of post-truth from an African perspective, where a history of resistance to colonial truth-claims now confronts new forms of neocolonial control in an age of centralized data systems and artificial intelligence. China’s data capabilities and surveillance technologies have begun to impact southern African governments with whom trade partnerships are growing, raising concerns of abuse of state control and ethnic profiling. Reflecting on the erosion of faith in the rational basis of Western democracy and renewed interest in questions of social influence in the time of the social network I reference the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Gabriel Tarde that suggest there is a drift between rational and irrational behaviour and continuity between conscious and unconscious states in the way that people influence and are influenced by one another. In questioning how Dada’s twin muses – the irrational and chance – figure in the age of data, I consider some South African artistic responses to current conditions that may resonate with historic Dada practice but talk to the idea of a ‘hypnotized subjectivity’ in the digital present.

Dada’s revolt Dada was an inevitable philosophical rupture, a necessary response to the failure of Enlightenment promises at the fin de siècle. Hugo Ball’s 1917 lecture at Galerie Dada, demonstrated his debt to Nietzsche: ‘Convictions have become prejudices. There are no more perspectives in the moral world . . . The

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transvaluation of values came to pass . . . The principles of logic, of centrality, unity and reason were unmasked as postulates of a power-craving theology.’3 Ball also closely aligned with Kandinsky’s call for an art of spiritual renewal. He noted that ‘artists of these times have turned inward . . . They seek what is essential and what is spiritual, what has not yet been profaned.’4 The Dadaists ridiculed the anthropocentric view of reality – assuming the world to be organized according to humanly intelligible laws and that all phenomena can be categorized and stabilized. They drew on French philosopher Henri Bergson’s view that the problem with reason and rationalist methodology was that no constituent or stable state of being exists. Matter is in a constant state of change, in the process of becoming something else. Logic is less useful than intuition. Nature is to be experienced as process, change and chance.5 For art historian Leah Dickerman, Dada reconceptualized artistic practice as a form of tactics that sought to disrupt ordering systems (including language) and question the idea of a ‘cohesive modern public’.6 Dadaist collages exemplify this strategy to upend the ‘order of things’ – fragments of photographs from popular magazines deconstructed and reconstituted to reveal underlying power relations and ideologies. The resurgence of interest in Dada after World War II coincided with the threat of nuclear war and struggles for independence in Africa and South East Asia. The term ‘Neo-Dada’ was most used between 1958 and 1962 by journalists and art critics to describe Dada tendencies they detected in the United States in the junk assemblage of pop art, Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, and the Fluxus movement that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic with a focus on experience and intermedia.7 In Europe, Dada inspired artistic positions against the backdrop of the collapse of French colonial power in Algeria and Vietnam. With an overt Marxist agenda, the Situationist International (1957–72) radicalized art’s role in pressing for social change, culminating in the student revolt of May 1968. The Nouveau Realisme group (1960) proposed a ‘new realism’ that engaged with everyday life. At the same time the Beat poets rediscovered Dada’s cut-up technique and used chance as a divination tool. William Burroughs believed that beneath the thin veneer of consensus reality, the technique of the cut-up revealed hidden truths in Cold War-era texts.8

Dada South? Against the violence of political resistance in South Africa, the oppositional strategies adopted by artists to address the mounting repression and censorship in the country might seem trivial, but in such a repressive environment even conceptual gestures were an ideological threat to the state. Artist Walter Battiss (1906–82) used his academic position as Professor of Fine Art at the University of South Africa from 1964 until 1971 to speak out against censorship and discrimination. Influenced by friendships with

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Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely (associated with the Fluxus and New Realism movements), Battiss adopted absurdist playful performance for social critique and in defence of sexual freedoms. Fluxus artist Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s media prank in New York on 1 April 1973, to establish Nutopia – an inclusive conceptual country with no laws (an absurdist public gesture that coincided with Lennon’s long wait for his US residence visa) – may have inspired Battiss to create Fook Island, an open participative project for an imaginary country with its own passport, stamps and diplomatic links. A Fook Island passport defied apartheid categorization and identity, and offered escape from a totalitarian society into a surreal world of imagination, freedom and whimsy. In contrast to this playful resistance, Lucas Seage (1956–2009) was a student at Soweto’s Molofo Arts Centre in 1976 when the Soweto Uprising occurred, sparked by the politics of language. When Afrikaans was made the compulsory language of instruction in black schools, the violent reaction that followed radicalized black youth and resulted in a second wave of activists imprisoned or forced to seek refuge in exile. Seage adopted junk assemblage as his medium to build militant images that spoke of state oppression and proclaimed art as a weapon in the spirit of Berlin Dada’s John Heartfield. In an interview with journalist Oswald Mtshali, who described Seage as an ‘avowed ecologist and conservationist’ for recycling the world’s debris, Seage stated his affinity with André Breton and Surrealism rather than Black Consciousness. Seage insisted his power came from his subconscious, and denied life could be categorized by race.9 Seage won a bursary to study at the Düsseldorf Academy under Joseph Beuys and Klaus Rinky in the 1980s. In later life Seage abandoned art-making to pursue the path of a traditional healer and shaman. Beuys’s introduction of shamanism and ecological-spiritual concerns into contemporary art practice resonates with concerns of South African artists that develop their work as an embodied engagement with traditional African spiritual practices. The South African artist Shelley Sacks pioneered performance art in the 1970s and also studied with Beuys in Düsseldorf, where after she took up Beuys’s mission to advance art practice as ‘social sculpture’ from the mid1970s. In her current pedagogic work Sacks promotes the notion of ‘aesthetics’ as feeling and experience (from the Greek word aes-thesia – meaning the ability to perceive, to experience, to feel through our bodies) in remedy of a technological world that ‘anesthetizes’, dulls the senses and sensibilities.10 Battiss, Sacks and Seage share Dada’s conviction to connect art back to the contingencies of everyday life and reflect on the vital issues of the day.

Complacency and resistance The protagonist of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) is an enduring figure we recognize all too well in today’s politicians. The foolish, infantile Clown-

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King, giddy with power, greedy and vain, cruel and dangerous. Jarry and Ubu were championed by Dada artists who sought an art that was provocative, crude and direct, that gave voice to collective disgust at the failure of political systems and bankrupt social values. In particular it was their desire to unsettle the complacent bourgeoisie and provoke reaction. Jarry’s play had a centenary performance in Johannesburg in 1997 with Ubu and the Truth Commission, created by Jane Taylor and William Kentridge. The play used personal accounts of apartheid atrocities presented by victims and perpetrators at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (a court-like restorative justice body established by Nelson Mandela in 1996 to promote National Unity and Reconciliation). Jarry’s infantile self-serving Ubu took the role of an apartheid policeman and sadistic interrogator. Actors using life-size marionettes created by the Handspring Puppet Company played the characters. This recalled the tradition of puppet theatre as a vehicle for social satire as employed by Dada artists: Sophie Taeuber with her production of The King Stag in Zurich in 1918; and Hanna Höch who made puppets part of her Berlin Dada activities. The crude parody and burlesque absurdity of Ubu Roi combined with harrowing accounts of atrocities was told through the proxy of puppets. This merging of fact and fiction against a backdrop of Kentridge’s expressionist animation and documentary video montage is indebted to Dada as much as to Samuel Beckett’s sense of the absurd and Bertolt Brecht’s activism. The work shares Berlin Dada’s imperative to implicate those complicit and complacent, those that create the conditions for such atrocities to manifest. Dada as an art of resistance, sometimes absurd, humorous or political, has echoed through the last century with particular significance for South African art.

The Body in performance In her insightful feminist study, The Explicit Body in Performance (2013), Rebecca Schneider wrote: The “Ubu” of the last turning century shocked at a time when colonialism – the question of who dis-covers, who governs, who medicalizes, who anthropologizes, who controls the production of the colonial other – was of pressing concern . . . Today, it is mostly women, artists of color, and gay and lesbian artists who, rather than utilizing shock for shock’s sake, are interrogating the social properties of that shock – interrogating the markings of “disgust” and “terror” by asking precisely who is disgusted and terrorized and across whose body has that disgust been inscribed?11 In our 2009–10 Dada South? exhibition, Lerato Bereng curated performances that highlighted the irony of hosting a review of anti-establishment Dada at the Iziko South African National Gallery. The neoclassical colonial building

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completed in the 1920s served as a backdrop that helped parody the power relationships at play. During the formal opening function outside the National Gallery, artist Kemang We Lehulere walked around wearing a frame of sapling branches to signal the temporary dwelling of a young male initiate, and shredded Afrikaans poetry schoolbooks with a large cheese grater – in reference to the 1976 Soweto Uprising that began with rejection of Afrikaans (Figure 6.1). I had found a Sesotho poem from Tristan Tzara’s collection of Poèmes nègres that We Lehulere identified as originating in a freestyle verse used during Basotho male initiation that he had himself undergone.12 He used a megaphone to recite such freestyle verse at high volume to disrupt my opening speech, metaphorically shouting back at Tzara, at white authorship and curatorship. ‘The “barbarians” themselves are reflexively re-presenting the primitivizing process,’ comments Schnieder of such current ‘Ubu shock tactics . . . pointing the finger at primitivism by exposing it as inscribed in a patriarchal vocabulary of differentiation, historically mapped upon their own specific physical markings – their explicit bodies.’13

FIGURE 6.1 Kemang Wa Lehulere performance during the opening of Dada South? outside the Iziko South African National Gallery, 2009. © Photo credit: Alexia Webster.

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Sitting in front of the steps of the National Gallery, artist donna Kukama enacted a performance entitled Great South African Queue (Figure 6.2). She used the megaphone to command visitors to stand in line and wait before they could enter the National Gallery to view the exhibition, for no reason – a wry comment on exclusion, institutional gatekeeping, obedience and conformity. Art as a means to interpret history and context has been key to the work of both Kukama and We Lehulere. They are founding members of the collective group Center for Historical Reenactments, which was initiated by Gabi Ngcobo in 2010 to test how art can ‘suggest different historical readings and help in the formation of new subjectivities’.14 These artists embrace the essence of Dada. They deploy the irrational, the absurd and humour to expose power relationships and critique Western culture and its institutions. They represent a new turn: working outside the gallery. These outdoor performances as well as the decolonizing focus of Center for Historical Reenactments presage a new form of Dadaist engagement that has become stronger in recent years among a new generation of postapartheid South African artists. It appears to be more a descendent of the genealogical line opened up by Happenings, taking the body into public space to level comment and provoke social change through raising consciousness. In their review of South African performance practices, Acts of Transgression (2019), Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle of the Institute of Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town collected writing on what they frame as ‘live art’ that ‘embodies the unpredictability of crisis’.15

FIGURE 6.2 donna Kukama performs The Great South African Queue, Iziko South African National Gallery, 2009. © Photo credit: Alexia Webster.

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The authors acknowledge the influence of performance practices originating in Western avant-guards and Dada, but choose to ‘situate experimental performance within [a] precolonial and decolonial African genealogy of ritual, ruptures and experimentally’. They refute ‘the notion that South African live art is a Western import’ arguing that this line of performance ‘derives from a mode of performativity and political radicalism that is integral to African tradition and protest culture’.16 While this may be true, the artists getting attention for their performance work are all university graduates, schooled in Western conceptual and performance art history. Art historian Nomusa Makhubu proposes Live Art as a radical form of ‘artistic citizenship’, referencing the political implications of Situationist Guy Debord’s psychogeography for apartheid cities.17 The effect of apartheid environments on citizens’ emotion and behaviour has been traumatic for many South Africans. As social fragmentation and the experience of ‘displacement and dehumanization’ persists, Makhubu suggests Live Art (performance, intervention or disruption in public space) may be understood as a form of citizenship, as a ‘mode of understanding belonging and governance’.18 Public performances in Cape Town’s central city by artists such as Buhlebezwe Siwani and Chuma Sopotela (Those Ghels, 2017) and Kahnyisile Mbongwa (ikuDanger!, 2017) are examples of live art events enacted in isiXhosa that Makhubu argues reveal ‘the central place of the township in cities’.19 Black students’ experience of exclusion from a shared ‘cultural citizenship’ fuelled the destruction of art at the University of Cape Town during the ‘Shackville’ protest in May 2016 (Figure 6.3). What started out as ‘a themed protest action’ (building a shack on campus to highlight lack of accommodation for black students) escalated to activists burning paintings from the surrounding residences.20 Such strategies of creative direct action have roots in anarchist tactics that inspired the likes of Hugo Ball and his contemporaries. Where the Dada artists provoked the public with parody and the absurd, South African activism is often didactic and polemic. The protest movement to remove the bronze sculpture of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town campus in 2015 (#RhodesMustFall) began with a performative act. Chumani Maxwele, dressed in black tights and pink construction helmet, asked the small crowd: ‘Where are our heroes and ancestors?’ before he flung sewerage from a container he had carried from the distant township of Khayelitsha over the sculpture.21 A month after Maxwele’s protest, performance artist Sethembile Msezane posed for the photo opportunity as the sculpture floated off its pedestal under a hydraulic arm, in front of an ecstatic crowd with raised phone cameras. Adorned with a beaded veil and sculptural wings, Msezane referenced Chapangu – the soapstone bird sculpture pillaged from Great Zimbabwe in 1889 – creating a photograph that became iconic of the #RhodesMustFall moment. In Msezane’s Public Holiday Series she uses long-duration performances in public spaces on national public holidays, usually in dialogue with

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FIGURE 6.3 Protestors carry paintings from the surrounding student residences to be burnt during the ‘Shackville’ protest at the University of Cape Town, 16 February 2016. © Photo: Ashleigh Furlong, for GroundUp. colonial- and apartheid-era public monuments, to highlight neglected histories. Msezane’s practice is indicative of a generation of visual activists who are informed by feminist and postcolonial theory, conscious of Western traditions of art performance, but who deliberately anchor their public interventions within African sartorial traditions, music, dance and spiritual practices that revere ancestral knowledge and healing: I use performativity in my work to locate myself within time and space. The body is loaded with history, identity and meaning. I found that the absence of my body as a black woman within public memorialised spaces muted my existence, thus erasing my history, identity and meaning. Therefore, Performance Art became a vehicle in highlighting these issues within my work.22

From the street to online activism The massacre of thirty-four striking miners by police at the Lonmin Platinum mine in Marikana on 16 August 2012 signalled that deadly state violence against black bodies, intrinsic to apartheid, continued to haunt South Africa

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through the ill-managed state apparatus in the service of multinational corporate interests. An anonymous collective of artists calling themselves Tokolos Stencil Collective mounted a street stencil-art campaign to ‘Remember Marikana’. Reminiscent of the 1980s punk-inspired political street art, Tokolos took their media online and made stencils available for download, targeting issues of gentrification and displacement in workingclass neighbourhoods of Cape Town.23 Dada, too, made use of the modern media network to spread its ideas and used the media networks themselves as sites of practice, and this is certainly a potentiality that contemporary South African artists seize upon. Katlego Disemelo writes about this ‘modernity’ – contemporaneity – in the practice of South African black queer artists who make use of Instagram and YouTube, mixing ‘high and low’ art platforms to project their art practice to a mass audience and simultaneously create a queer archive in the digital realm.24 The performance art duo named, FAKA (meaning ‘to insert’ in isiZulu), consists of ‘Desire Marea’ (Buyani Duma) and ‘Fela Gucci’ (Thato Ramaisa). They are popular DJs who also create sexualized performances and installations in the gallery space (Figure 6.4). Their music is a hybrid of Gqom (electronic Kwaito house music) and African gospel. In their YouTube videos FAKA perform dressed in retro femme, camp fashion with large wigs as a means to subvert music genres that they identify as heteronormative. Disemelo sees FAKA’s use of social media as a means to undo gender identity and expose gender as construction.25 Here, too, we can draw a link to historic Dada, which opposed binaries in general, and saw identity as fluid

FIGURE 6.4 Buyani Duma and Thato Ramaisa perform as Desire Marea and Fela Gucci as the performance art duo FAKA. Photographed by Viviane Sassen, 2015. © Viviane Sassen.

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and constructed. The cross-dressing Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven helped transform Marcel Duchamp into the performed feminine alter ego Rose Selavy.26 When the Baroness (in all likelihood) contributed the vulvashaped Urinal under the title ‘R.Mutt’ to enter modern art discourse, she radically critiqued not only conservative patriarchy as gatekeepers of the art establishment, but also class and wealth – the German word armut translates to ‘poverty’.27

Post-truth – Dada irrationality in the age of data For African artists, from the perspective of the Global South, it has been imperative to generate critical understandings of the postcolonial world within which propaganda and truth claims function. Questions of validity are filtered by a half-century of postcolonial writing that challenge totalizing systems of Western knowledge. The student protests on South African campuses during 2016 rekindled international debates on decolonization in education and institutional racism. James Scheurich noted in 2014 that the postmodern challenge (of research in the social sciences) is plagued by entrenched racial bias, ‘that racism in research . . . and racism in general . . . is . . . basically civilizational . . . White supremacy is built in or embedded at the deepest levels of Western modernism, at the deepest levels of our primary assumptions . . . that constitute all of our most fundamental categories – the individual, truth, knowledge, research, reality, reason etc.’.28 In the current age of data, Achille Mbembe warns that ‘the technologies of racialisation have become ever more insidious and ever more encompassing. As the world becomes a huge data emporium, tomorrow’s technologies of racialisation will be more and more generated and instituted through data, calculation and computation’.29 China’s ambition to lead the world in artificial intelligence plays out in Africa where it targets resources and markets. Surveillance technologies used to persecute Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province are being deployed into African markets increasingly dependent on Chinese telecoms and digital services. In 2018 CloudWalk Technology signed a deal with the Zimbabwean government, notorious for human rights abuses, to provide the country with mass face-recognition technology. The Chinese IT company aims to build the currently deficient database of black faces to gain market advantage in face-recognition software globally.30 In South Africa the growing Chinese ownership of news media networks has begun to censor criticism. In 2018 journalist Azad Essa had his long-standing column in a major newspaper – part of South Africa’s second largest media company, Independent Media, 20 per cent owned by Chinese state-linked companies – was cancelled directly after Essa criticized the Chinese government’s persecution of Uighur Muslims.31

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The internet age of the web and hypertext began with the promise of potentially infinite connectivity across rhizomatic networks that appeared to democratize access to information in a more lateral matrix. But it emerged that digital networks tend towards hierarchies, with a few nodes accounting for the greatest amount of all connectivity.32 The historian Yaval Noah Harari warned that the efficiency of data processing is best served by centralized systems. The revolution in information technology will make centralized dictatorships more efficient than democracies which, Harari believes, poses the greatest danger to liberal democracy. Democracy is not based on rationality, but on feelings that are easily manipulated: with appeals to our fears, hate and vanity.33 As our personal data is reaped for commercial opportunity, governmental control or interference by centralized data processing platforms, the power that now resides in these platforms to influence consumer and political choices on the basis of our online behaviour has far-reaching consequences: as the spectacle of the 2016 UK referendum and US election demonstrated. Cyber-interference has brought into question the rational basis of Western democracy. Do century-old Dada tactics and philosophies have relevance for younger generations facing today’s issues? In the hyper-connectivity of the twentyfirst century Dada’s tactical use of humour, the absurd and irrational that served to challenge conservative values and aesthetics and ridicule the capitalist status quo has migrated to this world of social media. Some suggest absurdist internet humour is a tool of social critique in the spirit of Dada, that critical meme culture rejects ‘traditional aesthetics of beauty, logic and capitalism in favor of a visual language that reflects the darkness, absurdity and unknowability of modern life’, and like Dada, seeks a reaction.34 Others argue that online humour of this age serves to pacify by distracting. That it lacks ‘political bite’, is ‘merely palliative . . . an appropriate cultural and political response to a public sphere in which it simply does not matter what anyone says, means or does’.35 The attention economy of online media that competes for our time privileges the sensational and humorous which threatens to dissolve any distinction between the rational and irrational, argues literary critic William Davies.36 Davies suggests that the exercise of reason in our everyday choices, when considered as ‘behavior’ or ‘culture’, comes down to a matter of ritual or habit. ‘Irrational choices’ are simply ‘bad habits’. Social groups tend to make choices based on the opinion of whatever expert is fashionable at a particular time, with little regard for empirical scientific evidence. ‘Established truths in modern secular societies are no less dependent on hierarchy and trust than those of religious societies,’ argues Davies.37 Our decisions are possibly more vulnerable than ever before to manipulation in the post-truth environment of social media. Brett Murray, who applied his artistic skills as an activist during the struggle against the apartheid government and supported the ANC before they came to power in 1994, directed his critique at the ruling party two decades later in a series of satirical and dystopian exhibitions: Hail To The

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Thief (2010, 2012), and Again Again (2015, 2017). Murray’s two-screen video installation, Triumph, shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale, juxtaposed a white and black politician (actors in identical suits) reading the same political speech derived from Leni Riefenstahl’s recordings of Hitler in the classic propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935) (Figure 6.5). Appeals to heritage, nationalism, struggle and destiny by both white and black actors parody the propaganda of a growing racial populism in South Africa. Murray suggests a continuity of rhetoric in the lineage from German National Socialism (against which the Dada artists rallied) to the oppression of Christian Nationalism that fuelled the apartheid regime (against whom we fought), to the current post-revolutionary political oppositions (both black and white) that pander to populist dissatisfaction with increasing economic inequality. Murray’s Triumph is an indictment of the divisive mechanisms of social media, where all debate is reduced to binary oppositions that polarize opinion, only to reflect each other as matching expressions of intolerance. In Murray’s Somnambulance Series (2014) seven life-size figures, modelled on friends, colleagues and family, are sleepwalking with arms outstretched. Murray’s concern is not just the numbing effect of social media but that the self is submerged in a ‘sleep of reason’, caught in a continual repetition, and subject to an apparent contagion that has turned one and all into zombies. Questions of social organization and influence in the age of artificial intelligence and the power of algorithms are explored in the performance work Swarm Theory: ‘a playful theatrical investigation into the possibilities of collective human intelligence in public space’,38 created by Kyla Davis and

FIGURE 6.5 Brett Murray, Triumph, 2015. Two-screen video, 6 min. 48 sec. © Image courtesy of Brett Murray.

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Daniel Buckland of the Well Worn Theatre Company (Figure 6.6). Swarm Theory ‘manifested’ in the streets of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown, host to the National Arts Festival) and Cape Town in 2019. A group of performers attempt to behave as a single collective mind, without leader, verbal communication or script. They take cues from those closest to them, responding to the stimulation and dangers of the urban public spaces, ‘selfsufficient, yet undirected and unpredictable, an adaptive, self-organising critical mass at the edge of chaos’.39 The work embodies several of Dada’s core elements: experiments with chance, pushing beyond individual rational behaviour to explore an unknown collective flow that integrates art with life, and activates public space. The swarm is an apt metaphor for the relationship of the individual to ‘the modern crowd’ in this time of accelerating artificial intelligence, with our behaviour shaped increasingly by social media. For Gilles Deleuze, reason is a ‘region carved out of the irrational – not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift’.40 Delueze incorporates the ideas of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Tarde’s Laws of Imitation (1890) defined society by how people imitate and innovate from each other, alternating between habit that repeats itself and fashion that innovates.41 In this age of digital networks, there is renewed interest in Tarde’s ideas of social influence. The British critical theorist Tony D. Sampson, known for the study of ‘virality’ in contemporary culture, draws on Tarde’s ideas of influence and Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblage theory (emphasizing fluid, interchangeable and rhizomic relationships), to investigate theories of contagion, to understand what makes information in a network travel and become viral. Sampson is intrigued by Tarde’s controversial idea that hypnotism plays a crucial role in the influence of one brain on another, and that there is continuity between conscious and nonconscious states. Sampson challenges us to contemplate the implications of

FIGURE 6.6 Still image from Swarm Theory V1.0 directed by Kyla Davis and Daniel Buckland at the National Arts Festival, Makhanda, 2019. © Copyright: Kyla Davis. Photo Credit: Daylin Paul.

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this spectacle of ‘social somnambulism’ in contemporary digital networks – the ‘idea of a hypnotised subjectivity’.42

Conclusion If Dada has a legacy in South African art, as we explored in the Dada South? project, it has been closely linked to social and political critique. During apartheid the strategies of historic and Neo-Dada served to further the battle for sexual and political freedoms. In the post-apartheid era the younger generations have embraced live art, tactics of direct action and online media to critique the colonial underpinnings of public institutions, public space and higher education. They combine art and activism to address issues of gender, institutional racism and inequality. Art has again taken to the streets to engage with the issues of the day. Dada’s concern with ontologies, the nature and purpose of life and art, was driven by the conviction that art had been separated from the contingencies of life. They yearned to reconnect and invigorate both. The Dadaists championed the irrational and chance to challenge orthodoxies. They tapped the unconscious mind to innovate and grow. Today’s networked individual, as Tony D. Sampson and William Davies suggest, is only halfconscious and easily triggered by irrational messages that appeal to the emotions. While increasingly clever algorithms slowly erode chance in favour of predictability – not only scoping the behaviour of individual subjects, but of all things – art’s potential to raise consciousness and critically engage with the issues of the day, particularly through the embodied experience of live art, may be more vital than ever. Scientist and environmental advocate Gus Speth concedes that, despite the potential of science to solve the environmental crisis, the main environmental problems are of ‘selfishness, greed, and apathy’ that require a ‘spiritual and cultural transformation’.43 Art’s transformative potential to link the materiality of place to environmental consciousness resonates with Hugo Ball’s call for an art of spiritual renewal, which is of particular value in this post-truth era.

Notes 1 See Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2017). 2 See S. Moeng, ‘Politicians, Poverty And Manipulating The Masses’, Business Essentials, 26 January 2017, https://www.businessessentials.co.za/2017/01/26/ politicians-poverty-manipulating-masses/ (20.12.2020), and T. Shapshak, ‘What Do Cambridge Analytica, Russian Trolls, Political Manipulation In South Africa Have In Common?’ Forbes, 30 March 2018, https://www.forbes.

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com/sites/tobyshapshak/2018/03/30/what-do-cambridge-analytica-russiantrolls-political-manipulation-in-south-africa-have-incommon/?sh=4320630d3dfb (20.12.2020). 3 Hugo Ball and John Elderfield, Flight out of time: a Dada diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 223. 4 Ibid., 225. 5 See Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The history of an attitude (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1998), 15. 6 Leah Dickerman, ed., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC : DAP, 2005), 7–8. 7 Susan Hapgood, ed., Neo Dada: Redefining Art 1958–62 (Scottsdale Center for the Arts: Universe Pub, 1994), 11–13, 36. 8 South African writer Sinclair Beiles edited William Burroughs’s fragmented text for Naked Lunch in 1959 for Olympia Press in Paris, before collaborating with Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin to produce the first cut-up novel, Minutes to Go, in 1960. 9 Oswald Mtshali, The Star, Johannesburg, 5 May 1980. 10 Wolfgang Zumdick, Death Keeps Me Awake: Joseph Beuys and Rudolf Steiner – Foundations of their Thought (Bamberg: AADR , 2014), 12. 11 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002), 150–1, https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/ view//9780415090261/?ar (10.06.2020). 12 Tristan Tzara and Marc Dachy, Découverte des arts dits primitifs: suivi de Poèmes nègres (Paris: Hazan, 2006), 106. 13 Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, 2002. 14 http://historicalreenactments.org/index3.html (09.122019). 15 Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, eds, Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019), 2. 16 Pather and Boulle, Acts of Transgression, 3. 17 Nomusa Makhubu, ‘Artistic Citizenship, Anatopism and the Elusive Public: Live Art in the City of Cape Town’, in Pather and Boulle, Acts of Transgression, 21. 18 Pather and Boulle, Acts of Transgression, 22. 19 Ibid., 23. 20 Supreme Court of Appeal Judgment: Hotz and Others v University of Cape Town, 20 October 2016, http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZASCA/2016/159. html (01.10.2019). 21 Pather and Boulle, Acts of Transgression, 2. 22 Gabriella Pinto, ‘Creative Women Sethembile Msezane On Black Women And Colonialist Ideologies’, 26 September 2015, https://10and5.com/2015/08/26/ creative-women-sethembile-msezane-black-women-colonialist-ideologies/ (01.10.2019). 23 https://tokolosstencils.tumblr.com (02.02.2020).

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24 Katlego Disemelo, ‘Performing the Queer Archive: Strategies of Self-Styling on Instagram’, in Pather and Boulle, Acts of Transgression, 219–42. 25 Ibid. 26 Nina R. Aaron, ‘This baroness was a sexual libertine whose brilliant Dadaist poetry is being rediscovered’, Timeline, 21 August 2017, https://timeline.com/ baroness-elsa-dada-poetry-ceef0930cd47 (09.02.2019). 27 Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2003), 222–6, and Siri Hustvedt, ‘A woman in the men’s room: when will the art world recognise the real artist behind Duchamp’s Fountain?’ The Guardian Online, 29 March 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchampfountain-women-art-history (01.05.2020). 28 James J. Scheurich, Research Method in the Postmodern (Hoboken, NJ : Taylor & Francis, 2014), 5. 29 Achille Mbembe, ‘Thoughts on the planetary’, Interview with Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen, Bergen, Norway, 30 November 2018, Newframe, 14 July 2018, https:// www.newframe.com/thoughts-on-the-planetary-an-interview-with-achillembembe/ (18.01.2020). 30 Amy Hawkins, ‘Beijing’s Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces’, Foreign Policy online, 24 July 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/beijings-bigbrother-tech-needs-african-faces/ (10.01.2020). 31 Azad Essa, ‘China Is Buying African Media’s Silence’, Foreign Policy online, 14 September 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/14/china-is-buying-africanmedias-silence/ (10.01.2020). 32 Tony D. Sampson, VIRALITY Blog, https://viralcontagion.blog/2012/10/28/ talks-on-virality-part-two/ (02.022020). 33 Yuval N. Harari, ‘Why Fascism Is So Tempting and How Your Data Could Power It’, TED Talk, posted on 23 May 2018 video, https://www.ted.com/ talks/yuval_noah_harari_why_fascism_is_so_tempting_and_how_your_data_ could_power_it/reading-list? 34 Madeleine Gaudin, ‘Call it fake, call it Neo-Dada: Absurdist internet humor is an artistic movement’, Michigan Daily, 12 September 2018, https://www. michigandaily.com/section/arts/call-it-fake-call-it-neo-dada-absurdist-internethumor-artistic-movement (10.12.2019). 35 William Davies, ‘Let’s eat badly’, London Review of Books 41:23 (5 December 2019), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n23/william-davies/lets-eat-badly (11.11.2019). 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 http://infectingthecity.com/2019/artwork/swarm (09.11.2019). 39 Ibid. 40 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 262, cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_ Deleuze#cite_note-41 (10.01.2020).

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41 Gustavo Tosti, ‘The Sociological Theories of Gabriel Tarde’, Political Science Quarterly 12:3 (September 1897): 495, 502, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/2139668 (02.02.2020). 42 Sampson, VIRALITY Blog. 43 Ailsa Hunt and Hilary Marlow, Ecology and Theology in the Ancient World: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 7.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paula Rego: A Dada Attitude against Authority in the Post-War Period Leonor de Oliveira

Paula Rego, (1935–2022) a naturalized British artist born in Portugal, combined in the beginning of her artistic activity means of automatic and unconventional creativity with an ironic and violent response to the dictatorial regime ruling Portugal in the 1950s and 1960s. The Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship, headed by António de Oliveira Salazar, was an extension of the nationalist, imperialist and totalitarian background of the first half of the twentieth century and therefore coincided in certain aspects with the environment that surrounded the Dadaist creative practices. To be sure, the Portuguese regime would plunge the country into brutal wars, which were fought in Africa against the anti-colonialist movements and guerrillas in the Portuguese colonies. The Estado Novo was established in 1933, succeeding a period of military dictatorship initiated in 1926. After World War II, Salazar’s regime was positively acknowledged by the Western democracies that did not force a political change in the country. This complacent attitude was mostly related to the importance of Portuguese territories in the defence of the North Atlantic area (with an American military structure established in the Azores) and with the threat of the Portuguese Communists replacing Salazar’s government after its fall. In 1961, the colonial wars broke out in Angola 143

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after a violent guerrilla attack in the north of the country. At the end of that year, the Indian Union invaded the Portuguese territories of Goa, Daman and Diu. Although the Portuguese military forces surrendered in India, the wars in Africa carried on until 1974, when the Portuguese dictatorship finally collapsed as a result of a military coup. In terms of civic rights and, more specifically, in terms of gender equality, the dictatorship in Portugal was, according to Virgínia Ferreira, ‘a glacial era of sorts, during which the few social conquests previously achieved were lost’.1 Dada’s creative reaction to the violence, war and dehumanization of contemporary times was certainly referential and appeared in the 1960s with renewed strength through retrospective shows and new artistic movements, such as Fluxus, pop art, the Nouveau réalisme (New Realism), and the Gutai Group in Japan.2 We may also identify Dada strategies in the work produced in the post-war period by Rego, who was at the time immersed in the international artistic exchanges taking place in London, but whose creativity also engaged with the political situation in Portugal. Indeed, Dada’s radical experimentalism and disruptive agency, and the consequent destabilization of crystallized perceptions of reality and normalized behaviours, provided the tools to creatively approach the brutality and arbitrariness of an anachronic totalitarian rule. Tellingly enough, in the title of the interview conducted by the art critic Fernando Pernes on the occasion of Rego’s first solo show in 1965, the artist promptly claimed that ‘her painting is not neo-dada’.3 In fact, what she probably said, as transcribed in the body of the interview, was that her paintings were not ‘neo’ anything, in Portuguese neo-nada. A simple change of letters gave the artist’s statement at the same time a suggestion of affiliation and an uncomplying attitude. Rego’s haunting and grotesque images reactivated Dadaist resources, using irony, absurdity, automatism and a visceral imagery as instruments of provocation. In doing so, she created an iconography of political resistance which conveyed a much more complex vision of the post-war world than the unifying discourse and claims of victory over fascism by the Western states and the conciliatory action of NATO. In a time where nationalism and populism are rising again as an answer to supposedly threatening circumstances such as terrorism, mass migration and unemployment, Rego’s work provides an eloquent example of how creative activity may become an instrument for debate and protest. She assumes, first of all, the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the human and immediately challenges any attempt of conditioning and silencing.

Vomiting Salazar Rego settled in London in 1951, but during the 1950s and 1960s travelled frequently between London and Portugal, which meant living between two

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different political, social and cultural contexts. For Rego, the atmosphere in her native country not only coincided thematically with her creative approach, which, according to the English painter Victor Willing, focused on domination, but also with a surreal imaginary, inspiring a nightmare-like and monstrous universe.4 In this period, her main artistic references were the painting of Max Ernst and Juan Miro and Jean Dubuffet’s work and advocacy of Art brut (‘outsider art’).5 Moreover, Rego had also been exposed to a particular creative approach to reality in London, especially at the Slade School of Fine Art, combining subjectivity, figurative expression and formal experimentalism, to which she added an automatic and unconscious creative process that linked up personal histories with political events happening at the time.6 The childish quality of her compositions, which underlined Dubuffet’s argument that children’s drawings are a genuine and truthful expression, established a disturbing parallelism between innocence and sordid and monstrous revelations. In the painting ironically titled Salazar vomiting the homeland (1960), Rego conveys a perverse vision of the regime and exposes at the same time irrational and grotesque features, which deform the respectable and serious image of the Portuguese dictator (Figure 7.1). This operation of distortion is

FIGURE 7.1 Paula Rego, Salazar vomiting the homeland, 1960. Oil on canvas, 94 × 120 cm. Centro de Arte Moderna, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London.

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a meaningful one given the unchallenged credibility of Salazar both on the national and international stages. As Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses explains in his biography of the dictator: From a humble background, Salazar had risen to prominence not through bravery on the battlefield, or demagogic oratory, but rather through academic achievement; this fact, which immediately sets him apart from Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, made it easier to believe the claims advanced on his behalf, since it was almost unthinkable to believe that a professor from the ancient University of Coimbra would engage willingly in the distortion of his own life story for political gain. But the very opposite was true.7 Art historiography in Portugal has secluded the interpretation of artistic production in a formalist and abstract territory and, as a result, the impact of specific artworks almost never transcends the fields of art and culture. Another negative consequence is that such reading dissociates artistic practice from civic agency. The intersection between Rego’s early work and Dada creativity expands the impact of her paintings beyond the artistic territory and allows them to intervene in the deconstruction of political propaganda and in the critical reinterpretation of the dictatorial period. Indeed, Salazar vomiting the homeland, with its visceral and decomposed bodies, makes visible the distortion that Meneses mentions in his analysis and denounces the almost mythification of the Portuguese dictator that still persists today. Like the Dadaists, Rego first enacted ‘agency through a deliberate system of dismantling, only thereafter inviting hasard into the work’.8 In the case of the Portuguese artist, hazard, as already mentioned, happened through free association of stories that came into her mind while painting or drawing, or, later, while pasting on the canvas cuttings from newspapers or from her own drawings. Rego recalls that when she started to paint Salazar vomiting the homeland she began by creating a lubricious figure of a woman (on the right) but felt suddenly compelled to represent the Portuguese dictator in a disgusting action (the figure on the left). In this process, subjectivity was an active player and therefore, according again to the artist, she aimed, through her creative work, to give fear a face.9 By associating Salazar with strange and repulsive creatures made of organic forms and genitalia, Rego attempted to share and transfer her feelings of nausea and disgust about the Portuguese dictator to the viewer. The deliberate provocation of embodied sensations was an element of the artist’s production that Victor Willing emphasized, while criticizing the erotic reading of her paintings. Willing claimed instead that Rego’s ‘imagery is visceral which means intestines, stomach, mouth, anus and genitals. Appetites are felt in the organs, emotions provoke reactions in the organs. Eroticism is an idea not a feeling.’10

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There is, as Abigail Susik noted in her analysis of chance and automatism in the Dadaist and Surrealist production, a ‘hybridity of control and chaos’, which we may identify in Rego’s works as well: while the ‘choreographed act of deconstruction also becomes, in turn, reflective of anarchic impulses of spontaneity . . . the results of the chance gesture (the drop, toss, or random selection) often ironically reveal a latent tendency toward order or form’. Susik concludes: ‘Dada chance, therefore, appears to serve in some capacity as a demonstration of the absurdity of binaries such as chaos and order, agency and autonomy, for these boundaries are ultimately revealed as permeable or reversible in the dada act.’11 The recognition of an intention in Rego’s action, which controls the apparent chaos of her compositions, suggests then an element of chaos in the ordained, controlled and hierarchical system that she aimed at dismantling. The permanent vigilance of authority in Portugal at the time created a distorted experience of reality since freedom of speech, freedom of movement, protest or spontaneous behaviour were suspended interminably. Rego used therefore painting and drawing as a space of free expression where irony, absurdity, distortion and arbitrariness were used not only as means of provocation, but also as elements of recognition of a parallel reality that was equally absurd and arbitrary. Moreover, she also intended through her creative practice to disrupt the foundational binary that naturalized divisions between men and women. In a society sharply divided between the two genders, women had essentially a passive presence. As Maria Manuel Lisboa pointed out, ‘domesticity, chastity, obedience and submission to the husband as official head of the family – and through him to Salazar as Head of the State, and to God as Universal Father – were all officially propounded in ministerial decrees’.12 In other words, government sanctioned women’s subsidiary place in society and subsequently controlled their aspirations and desires.13 The direct depiction of female genitalia, phalli and viscera in Salazar vomiting the homeland and in other paintings of the same period evidenced a sexual subjectivity which was socially and artistically denied to women. In this regard, the art world shared with the dictatorship the constant repression of expressions of femininity (in plural) other than the pre-existing notions. These did not consider women as a subject of sexual desire; on the contrary, they were always the objects of phallocentric lust. Rego produced therefore a scandalous provocation which was noticed by the men attending the opening of her first solo show, which took place at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (National Society of Fine Arts) in Lisbon in December 1965. One of them, who had been ‘counting the phalluses’ displayed in the exhibition, asked Rego ‘whether her interest in “pissers” meant she was a prostitute. She said that if a whore painted she would paint churches.’14 While painting and also while hosting her own exhibition, Rego executed a transfigurative performance by appropriating the faculty of agency that

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was in the Salazarist society a prerogative of men. At the same time, she ‘dismantled’ the pre-conceived image of a well-educated young artist, wife and mother.15 In doing so, she was transgressing the patterns of artistic and sociological representation of femininity and disrupting the binary divide between genders, like the Dadaists and especially like the women members of the movement.16 Rego’s exhibition confronted therefore the imposed political order and patriarchal society by restating the premonitory question Tristan Tzara introduced in his Dada Manifesto, and by, once more, correcting the sense of male predominance implicit in his words: ‘How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man?’17 Rego’s show turned indeed a human face against totalitarianism.

In a black and white city of great inertia Rego’s first individual exhibition confirmed the disruptive effect that the artist aspired to produce in Portuguese society and its artistic milieu. Her paintings were shown in a politically controlled city and in an institution, the National Society of Fine Arts, which had a previous story of dictatorial interference.18 The National Society was an association of artists that had previously been dominated by naturalistic painters, but since the late 1950s was taken over by modern artists and critics. The invitation to Rego came from Fernando Pernes, who was at the time the director of the Modern Art Gallery of this institution. Pernes probably justified his decision to exhibit the artist’s paintings with the strong impact that her first presentation in Lisbon had made on the Portuguese artistic scene. In 1961, Rego participated in the Segunda Exposição de Artes Plásticas (Second Exhibition of Plastic Arts) organized by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,19 which coincided with a politically troubled time. The colonial wars in Africa had broken out that same year, in March, and, in December, the Indian Union army invaded the Portuguese territories in India. The works Rego presented at the exhibition intersected this event with the political moment lived in the country, introducing in the Gulbenkian show a veiled critique of the regime.20 The Portuguese art critics, for their part, singled out the originality of her paintings and drawings, which announced the end of the traditional figuration/abstraction dichotomy and, as a result, confirmed the emergence of a new creative concept: the ‘new figuration’.21 Eventually, Rego responded to the claims for a renewal of Portuguese artistic production that, at the same time, revalidated the social role of the artist through a painting formally modern, but imbued with a more humanistic content.22 Four years later, Rego’s first solo show would also coincide with the end of an eventful year, an annus horribilis for the political opposition and intellectual and artistic resistance to the dictatorial regime. In February 1965 the major figure of the opposition, the general Humberto Delgado, ‘the fearless general’, who had in 1958 ran for President of the Republic

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against the regime’s candidate and stated during the campaign that he would sack Salazar if he was elected, was murdered by members of the political police on the Spanish border with Portugal. In May, the Portuguese Writers Society awarded its literary prize to Luandino Vieira, an Angolan writer who had been condemned two years earlier to fourteen years in Tarrafal concentration camp (Cape Verde) for supposedly carrying out terrorist acts in Luanda. Following the announcement of the winner of the prize, a group of right-wing extremists destroyed the Writers Society headquarters and this association was abolished by the government. Also in 1965, the political repression reached new levels of violence: the political police tortured prisoners or suspects with more brutality than ever and censorship was strengthened and controlled directly by Salazar himself. The strategy was now to correct the author and not the text. In the meantime, the wars in the Portuguese colonies in Africa went on mobilizing resources, and thousands of youths or leading young men to flee the country to escape the war.23 Given all these ominous events, the environment in Lisbon in the end of 1965 could not be but sombre and harsh. For Rego, the Portuguese capital came already out in ‘black and white’ and outlined by rigid moral precepts and social stratifications. As she explained in an interview published after the opening of her exhibition, in such an ‘atmosphere where it is necessary to restate problems of false simplicity one finds great inertia. That inertia moulds us into an inflexible and stubborn object.’24 Implicitly, Rego exposed the readers to a critical perspective on Portuguese society and we may wonder whether that ‘inflexible and stubborn object’ was not a metaphor of Salazar himself. The dictator was therefore a product of the Portuguese social and historical context and at the same time the instrument that enabled that ‘inertia’ and also a fantasy about heroic history of Portugal to perpetuate. That fantasy, which was also based on the presumably civilizing and pacifying impact of the Portuguese presence overseas, would justify the imperialistic view of the regime and its wars against anticolonial movements in Africa.25 Rego’s exhibition in Lisbon and public intervention evidences, however, that there was space in the artistic context of the city for confrontational and dissenting attitudes, which, given the events of that year, could well be claimed as Dadaist interventions. Victor Willing described the opening day in a letter to the Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda and mentioned the disruptive effect that the artist intended to produce not only through her works but also through sabotage of normalized social performativity. Willing also suggested that the exhibition became a troubling matter even before its opening, probably causing a disarray between the director of the Modern Art Gallery and the board of the Society. Willing was uncertain whether this disarray was caused by Rego’s exhibition or not, but the fact that the show had to be postponed until after Christmas is quite telling. As for the opening day, Willing and Rego had to set up the display by themselves. By 3.30 p.m. ‘it was hung, lit and floor swept’.26 Willing continues:

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At 5.00 four waiters appeared with tables and crates of whiskey and vodka, and 5.45 Paula reappeared from the hairdresser in a new outfit and mixed the ‘lemonade’ for the ladies (heavily laced with vodka), at 6.00 people began to arrive. By 6.45 the Gallery was packed and by 7.00 the noise was at a pitch which was provoked more by the alcohol than the need to be heard. França [a Portuguese art critic] said ‘too many people to see the pictures, too much painting to see the people’. By 8.00 groups of people hanging onto one another in tipsy euphoria, no doubt affaires were begun and others ended. At 8.30 we left and had dinner. Next day we heard from the waiters the formidable consumption and they told with amazement and disapproval of one couple which emerged from the Gallery at 9.30 and danced down the middle of the road toward the av. da Liberdade. Cars stopped people put heads out of the windows. The couple went on dancing, dancing. Common enough in Chelsea but rare in Lisbon.27 The environment of folly that surrounded the opening of the exhibition may be interpreted as the corollary of death, persecution and terror, which marked the country and the Portuguese presence in Africa. The chaos that inhabited Rego’s canvases was thus transferred to the exhibition rooms at the National Society and to the streets of Lisbon, where standardized forms of sociability and behaviour were suspended. This ephemeral space of freedom exorcised fear but at the same time exposed the insanity of the times. Rego’s exhibition gave therefore to the 1965 Christmas festivities a perfect epilogue and, to the end of the year, the necessary anticipation. Was there anything to celebrate that year? Surely, quotidian life still went on as usual. But events like Rego’s exhibition allowed daily life to incorporate the absurdity of the political times. Nevertheless, as Willing noted, the guests of the opening event failed to understand the deeper significations of the artist’s lascivious bodies. They were indeed much more political than erotic, much more visceral than recreational. And as we look to the titles of the works displayed, we are immediately confronted with images of violence and fear.28

A geography of fear While the exhibition at the National Society was still open, an interview with Rego conducted by her friend Alberto de Lacerda was published, without some irony, on Christmas Day, 1965. This interview included the dramatic statement by the artist, already quoted, that the reason why she painted was to ‘give fear a face’.29 Fear was undoubtedly a determining element in her artistic activity and this is particularly evident in the comments about the political climate in Portugal implicit in her early work. Fear is eloquently represented in the painting Trilogy of fear or The three faces of fear (c. 1964), which is organized as a triptych, each field defined with a specific aesthetics (Figure 7.2). The understanding of each moment and the

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FIGURE 7.2 Paula Rego, Trilogy of fear or The three faces of fear, c. 1964. Acrylic, oil, crayon, graphite and paper glued on canvas, 86 × 138 cm. Private collection. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London.

overall message is not immediate. Is Rego depicting the three stages of human life? Or is she pointing to the three institutions that conventionally order human behaviour – politics, society and religion? On the other hand, given the multiple possibilities of interpretation, the title of this painting leads us to project our own fears on each sector of this trilogy. It means that, as Rego bases her creative practice on subjective experience, or her fears, we are invited to reflect our own subjectivity on her paintings. Inevitably, the suggestive titles, the monstrous and organic imagery, the violence implicit in the artist’s compositions force us to recall haunting memories of the past or present causes of distress. But Rego also conveys tormented images of an infamous collective destiny. Indeed, the Iberian peninsula, dominated at the time by the dictatorships of Salazar and Franco in Portugal and Spain, respectively, stained the map of western Europe with the remnants of totalitarianism and war. Iberian dawn (1962), also presented in the exhibition, portrays the sunrise upside down in the Iberian countries, whose landscape is completely pictorial, that is, the bi-dimensional nature of the canvas determines the constitution of a reversed world inhabited by strange creatures (Figure 7.3). Several random pieces of papers were pasted on the canvas, making up a frieze that runs along the entire upper breadth of the painting. It contains various statements, such as ‘Urray! Victory!’, and carols, catholic expressions, excerpts of courtesy letters and children’s writing exercises (probably done by her children). The handwritten papers along with the naive figuration give an apparent innocence to the composition, charging with irony the image of a drifting territory. By claiming a specific cultural and also political context, which the dispersed writings in Portuguese underline, this painting projects a geography of fear. In the end, Rego’s intuitive drawing and

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FIGURE 7.3 Paula Rego, Iberian dawn, 1962. Acrylic, graphite and paper glued on canvas, 72.5 × 92 cm. Private collection. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London.

spontaneous and random writings are an exercise of freedom of expression and communication that defies the normative social behaviour and censorship imposed by totalitarianism. Another painting depicts even more dramatically the Iberian context of the time. The dogs of Barcelona (1965) evokes a particular episode, which was narrated by the artist herself: ‘the Barcelona authorities decided that there were too many stray dogs and came up with the brutal plan of indiscriminately spreading pieces of poisoned meat throughout the city. To me, this reflected the political situation of the time, in both Spain and Portugal, since my country was ruled by an equally brutal dictatorship’ (Figure 7.4).30 Rego’s statement is very clear about how the events occurring in Spain had a symbolical resonance for the Portuguese that opposed the dictatorial regime. There is even a more morbid detail in this story, as poor people also started eating the meat, falling dead afterwards like the dogs. In her painting, however, she focused on the latter characters, creating an arena-like space gathering the moribund animals that are harassed by flies, a mass of flesh and unidentified organic forms or deformed bodies. The

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FIGURE 7.4 Paula Rego, The dogs of Barcelona, 1965. Oil, crayon and paper glued on canvas, 160 × 185 cm. Private collection. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London.

artist indicated that she had in mind the Catalan Romanesque paintings and specifically used a representation of the poor beggar Lazarus having his wounds licked by a dog. This dog, which was able to perform such a merciful act, was now the innocent victim of political power, representing the cruelty and aggression inherent to totalitarianism. This scene conveys altogether a morbid image of despair underlined by the grimy and earthy colours that were associated with cruelty and slaughter in an earlier painting entitled, When we had a house in the country we’d throw marvellous parties and then we’d go out and shoot negroes (1961). Like The dogs of Barcelona, this painting set the propagandistic discourse of the dictatorship and the apparent peaceful and glamorous living in the colonies against the brutal oppression that sustained the colonial system, which finally surfaced with the military conflict. The violence and inhumanity embedded in both paintings were reinforced by Rego’s creative action, literally speaking. She hacked and scratched into the canvas and introduced cutting papers from newspapers or from her own drawings. In Willing’s reading, the artist’s gestures mimicked the circle of violence that her work encompassed.31

Conclusion Rego’s creative gestures are indeed deeply marked in the pictorial surface. As we trace the energetic and many times violent intervention of the artist in

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the canvas, we identify a Dadaistic response to the circumstances that surrounded her creativity and life, we follow therefore a particular experience of reality, and we are also engaged in a visual experience that presses us to see beyond normalized perceptions of authority and femininity. However, while preparing her solo show in Lisbon, Rego was very careful in concealing the political meaning of her paintings by editing the titles (Stray dogs instead of The dogs of Barcelona, for instance). Alberto de Lacerda’s introduction printed in the catalogue was also revised and the excerpts mentioning ‘collaborationist animals’, ‘the enemy triumphs’, ‘evil people that accuse and judge and intrigue. And hurt other people’ deleted.32 Nevertheless, the painter Eduardo Batarda, who was in 1965 studying painting at the Lisbon School of Fine Art, recalled years later the shocking impact that this exhibition had on the Portuguese artistic community. They were confronted then with a painting that was not only free from selfcensorship in its creative conception, but also denounced the frailties and tacit compromises that Portuguese artists had internalized over time and kept them from challenging the status quo: This is hard to remember and still more difficult to express today; but how repugnant it was to us Portuguese artists at the time, how revolting to our repressed/repressive minds. Even the way she made her pictures, the technical approach, the very colours themselves (the colours of the next London season?) were shockingly new. There were so many reasons for our hatred – and hatred it was. Some of us called it admiration but that was certainly a lie.33 According to Batarda’s recollection, Portuguese artists who attended the exhibition realized that their creative practice could not be indifferent to the troubled political situation lived in the country and that they could through their work confront the state’s repressive machine. We may then conclude that the creative dissidence that Rego pursued was indeed parallel to the agency assumed by the Dada artists. For them, the indifference to political troubles secluded artistic practice within the realm of bourgeois consumption and self-satisfaction. Creativity should therefore produce a strong reverberation in the consciousness of the artistic community, an awakening from their numbness before the political drama lived in their own lifetime. Like the Dadaists, Rego associated new forms of political resistance with experimental creativity, thus repositioning the artist as an agitator in a conformist and repressed society. The same (Dada) instruments – irony, absurdity, automatism and the grotesque – were therefore used to dissect the post-war reality and reveal its contradictions, and the persistence of violence and war. But, as we have seen, Rego’s work not only introduces alternative visions of that period and deconstructs the propagandistic imagery of the

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dictatorship and of the Western bloc; it also helps us today to critically address established narratives about Portuguese history and identity which reiterate the historical fantasies created by the dictatorship. Rego’s radical and subversive universe still powerfully remind us that an already moulded perspective must always be questioned, that we must not conform to imposed order.

Notes 1 Virgínia Ferreira, ‘Engendering Portugal: Social Change, State Politics and Women’s Social Mobilization’, in António Costa Pinto, ed., Contemporary Portugal: Politics, Society and Culture (Boulder, CO : Social Science Monographs, 2003), 169. 2 Since the early 1950s, different galleries and museums in London organized exhibitions devoted to Dada artists. In December 1952, the Institute of Contemporary Arts opened an exhibition with works by Max Ernst. Years later, in 1961, the Tate Gallery would also hold an exhibition dedicated to the artist. Between 1959 and 1960, the Arts Council toured an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters’s works, which were also displayed at the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, in London, in 1963. In June 1966, the Tate Gallery opened a retrospective exhibition dedicated to the work of Marcel Duchamp. For this occasion, the artist Richard Hamilton worked on a reconstruction of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. See Helen Molesworth, ‘From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again’, October 105 (Summer 2003): 177–81. 3 Fernando Pernes, ‘Entrevista com Paula Rego: A minha pintura não é neodada’, Jornal de Letras e Artes 223 (5 January 1966): 1. 4 Victor Willing (1928–88) met Rego in the early 1950s at the Slade School of Fine, where both were studying painting, marrying her in 1959. Willing consistently complemented his wife’s work with literary essays that created an interpretative framework for her paintings. See Willing’s article, ‘The “Imagiconography” of Paula Rego’, Colóquio: Artes 2 (April 1971): 43–9. 5 See the interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, Diário de Notícias (25 December 1965): 4. See also the interview with the artist conducted by John McEwen, ‘Paula Rego em conversa com John McEwen’, in Paula Rego (Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Centro de Arte Moderna, 1988), n.p. 6 Rego attended the Slade School from 1952 to 1956. The specificities of the pedagogy of this School were in this period based on the creative methods of its director, William Coldstream, which implied a subjective and analytical approach to reality and also to its social challenges. For more information, see Leonor de Oliveira, Portuguese artists in London: shaping identities in post-war Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2020). 7 Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Salazar: A political biography (New York: Enigma Books, 2009–10), xi.

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8 Abigail Susik, ‘Chance and Automatism: Genealogies of the Dissociative in Dada and Surrealism’, in David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 245. 9 Interview with Paula Rego conducted by Alberto de Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 4. 10 Letter from Victor Willing to Alberto de Lacerda. Estoril, 30 December 1965. BNP: Alberto de Lacerda Estate. 11 Susik, ‘Chance and Automatism’, 246. 12 Maria Manuel Lisboa, Paula Rego’s Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 13. 13 Virgínia Ferreira provides specific information about the legal repression of women: ‘[T]he code stipulated husbands had a right to denounce contracts signed by their wives without their prior consent. Married women were therefore dependent on their husbands’ power of veto in the world of work. This was also true for other aspects of life. Women could not leave the conjugal home or cross national borders without their husbands’ consent. The civil code also stated married women had to take care of the home: domestic work thus became legally compulsory’. Ferreira, ‘Engendering Portugal’, 168. 14 Letter from Victor Willing to Alberto de Lacerda. 1965. 15 Rego was born into an upper-middle class industrial family. In 1960, she was already a mother of two and, in 1961, her third son was born. For more biographical information, see the catalogue edited by Catarina Alfaro, Nick Willing and Leonor de Oliveira, Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories (Cascais: Fundação D. Luís I, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, 2017), and Nick Willing’s documentary with the same title, produced by the BBC (2017). 16 For more information about the provocation and defiance of the codes of sexuality and gender by the Dadaists and the role of women in the Dada movement and their contribution to feminist causes, see the essay by Tirza True Latimer, ‘Equivocal Gender: Dada/Surrealism and Sexual Politics between the Wars’, in Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 352–65; the volume Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, edited by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Irene Gammel’s biography of Baroness Elsa, GENDER, Dada, and Everyday M o d e r n i t y: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 17 Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918. This manifesto is translated into English and reproduced in Rudolf Kuenkli, ed., Dada (London: Phaidon, 2006), 197–200. 18 In 1952, the regime closed down the National Society of Fine Arts after its direction expelled the painter Eduardo Malta for making false accusations against another member of the Society. In order to prevent the influence of communist ideas in this artistic organization, the regime supported its ultra-conservative faction as its intervention clearly testified. 19 The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was a private institution created in 1956 after the bequest of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869–1955), an oil

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businessman of Armenian origin, naturalized British, who lived his last years in Lisbon. 20 Rego presented in this exhibition the painting When we had a house in the country . . . that will be mentioned later in the chapter. 21 See the reviews by Artur Maciel, ‘Exposições. II Exposição de Artes Plásticas organizada pela Fundação Gulbenkian na FIL’, Colóquio: Revista de artes e letras 17 (February 1962): 37–43, and Rui Mário Gonçalves, ‘A II Exposição da Fundação Gulbenkian’, Jornal de Letras e Artes 15 (10 January 1962): 8–10 and 14. 22 See Nikias Skapinakis’s Inactualidade da arte moderna (Lisboa: Seara Nova, 1958) and Mário Dionísio’s Conflito e unidade da arte contemporânea (Lisboa: Iniciativas Editoriais, 1958). 23 For an extended contextualization of this period, specifically its impact on artistic production, see the book about the Portuguese painter Júlio Pomar by Irene Flunser Pimentel, Júlio Pomar – O Pintor no Tempo (Lisboa: Documenta, 2018). See also Manuel Loff, ‘Marcelismo e ruptura democrática no contexto da transformação social portuguesa dos anos 1960 e 1970’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 5:19 (2007): 145–84. 24 Pernes, ‘Entrevista com Paula Rego’, 1. 25 As Bruno Cardoso Reis pointed out in his assessment of the participation of Portugal in the United Nations since 1955, the country acted as a rogue state, ‘going against mainstream global norms’, namely the norm of decolonization. However, the country acknowledged this topical matter in international politics by issuing a constitutional amendment that stated that Portugal had no longer colonies, but ‘overseas provinces’. Salazar’s arguments were based on the principle that those territories were, with the European borders, an essential part of the country as a whole, converting Portugal in a ‘multiracial’ and ‘pluricontinental’ nation. In fact, Portuguese colonialism was by then in denial. See Bruno Cardoso Reis, ‘Portugal and the UN: A Rogue State Resisting the Norm of Decolonization (1956–1974)’, Portuguese Studies 29:2 (2013): 251–76. 26 Letter from Victor Willing to Alberto de Lacerda, 1965. 27 Letter from Victor Willing to Alberto de Lacerda, 1965. 28 The exhibition comprised nineteen paintings created between 1961 and 1965: Cães Vadios (Stray Dogs), Julieta (Juliet), O Impostor (The Impostor), Manifesto, Alegoria Britânica (British Allegory), Retrato do Bartolomeu e da Susan (Portrait of Bartolomeu and Susan), Centauro (Centaur), O Exilado (The Exile), Gorgona (Gorgon), Ansiedade de Agosto (August Anxiety), Fim de Setembro (Late September), Aurora Latina (Iberian Dawn), Tarde de Verão (Summer Afternoon), Neve (Snow), Provérbio (Proverb), Trilogia do Medo (Trilogy of Fear), Violência Infantil (Nursery Violence), Freira (Nun), Fevereiro 1907 (February 1907). See Paula Rego (Lisboa: Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, 1965). 29 Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 4. 30 McEwen, ‘Paula Rego em conversa com John McEwen’. 31 Willing, ‘The “Imagiconography” of Paula Rego’, 43.

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32 See in the catalogue 1961: Order and Chaos (Cascais: Fundação D. Luís I – Casa das Histórias-Paula Rego, 2014), 37, the first version of this text, ‘Poem (in prose) entitled Paula Rego’ with the excerpts excluded indicated in the margins. The text published in the 1965 catalogue signalled these gaps and was tellingly entitled, ‘Fragments of a poem entitled Paula Rego’. 33 Batarda is quoted by John McEwen in the book Paula Rego, 3rd edn. (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 72 and 76.

donna Kukama, Page One-Fifty-Two, 2021. 159

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PART THREE

Big Dada Data

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Big Dada, Big Data: Schwitters’s Merzbau, the Private and the Trash Natalie P. Koerner

Big data practices are governed by processes of insatiable accumulation, absurd correlations generated by machine-learning algorithms, unabashed appropriation, and invasion into the minds of internet users, including their opinions and socially networked emotions.1 Due to its all-encompassing urge to record and archive, big data knows no taboos and no limits, especially in relation to privacy. To contextualize the elusive tactics of limitless data harvesting and hoarding, this chapter anchors some of the underlying processes governing big data in a Dada art piece that can be understood as an analogue precursor to the digital cloud. Against the backdrop of privacy and archiving, German artist Kurt Schwitters’s (1887–1948) Merzbau (c. 1921–37) shows that the Dadaist lens of nonsense can help to explain big data (Figures 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3). Dada not only conjures big data in its global embrace of gibberish and total lack of inhibition. Dada also holds lessons for confronting the absurdity of big data and the present’s conflicted relationship with history that manifests itself in the compulsion to archive. Where Dada used chance, collage, assemblage and montage as construction principles, big data uses comparable strategies of data mining and random correlations. The Merzbau was an expansive den filling out several rooms, threedimensionally collaged out of refuse and found objects. In the Merzbau, the good, the bad, the grotesque, the haunting and the banal accumulated side by side, seamlessly united under coats of paint and plaster. Linking this 165

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FIGURE 8.1 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933. © bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photo: Wilhelm Redemann.

artwork with big data contextualizes the digital world’s obsession with storing everything. The Merzbau archived, preserved and simultaneously concealed the stuff it was made of. Understanding how Schwitters integrated the intimate realm of his personal memories within an archive of collectively produced trash

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FIGURE 8.2 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933. © bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photo: Wilhelm Redemann.

found in public may help us conceptualize privacy and property in relation to big data. As an ever-evolving archive, it creates parallels to the conceptualization of the digital cloud – the umbrella term for archived (big) data – where the ephemeral concepts of privacy and digital memory clash.

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FIGURE 8.3 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1933. © bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photo: Wilhelm Redemann.

Thriving on trash The Merzbau fed off discarded objects – the refuse and residue of Hanover’s inhabitants – that Schwitters diligently collected. The ever-expanding construct was space-invading and voracious. Like a parasite, its size was informed and delimited by its host, Schwitters’s home and studio at Waldhausenstraße 5. It spanned several storeys, growing through windows and roof lights and reaching beyond the balcony. Out of a messy array of ‘materials of all kinds, rags, limestone, cufflinks, logs of all sizes, newspaper clippings’ in Schwitters’s studio, the Merzbau grew steadily.2 Kate Steinitz, a friend and collaborator, said: ‘Schwitters literally used the ruin and the ruined fragments of the immediate past, trash, as his material of choice.’3 Another friend, the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, remembered how Schwitters always kept his eyes to the ground; he was looking for objects, material for his collages. Anything would do: old and new tram tickets, bits of cardboard, cuttings of material, crumpled boxes. Everything was immediately sorted in his head, arranged, intended for a certain place in a certain collage.4

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With a sheer endless supply of building material, the Merzbau was an incredibly generative, all-consuming project in the life of Schwitters and his co-habitants – his parents, wife Helma and son Ernst. Ernst recalled that the construction process was one of increasing densification and invasive expansion, observing that his father’s paintings and initially freestanding sculptures were joined first by strings and later by wires, wooden structures, and finally, with plaster of Paris. He wrote: ‘This structure grew and grew and eventually filled several rooms on various floors of our home, resembling a huge, abstract grotto.’5 The artwork was often portrayed as a thriving organism, inexorable and uncontainable, that ‘started to sprout through the outer shell of the house (stretching finally) from the subterranean to the sky’.6 ‘Essentially limitless’, the Merzbau only came to a reluctant halt after sixteen years of expansion, when Schwitters had to abandon the project and leave the country in 1937 in order to avoid a pending interview invitation from the Gestapo.7 The structure was eventually eradicated during Allied bombing raids in 1943. Explaining the extent of the lost Merzbau in a 1946 letter, Schwitters recalled: ‘Eight spaces were merzed in the house. Practically, my Merzbau was not an individual space, but . . . sections of the Merzbau were distributed over the whole house.’8 The Merzbau grew through a skylight in the attic and ended in ‘a little platform on the roof for sunbathing, accessible by means of a tiny staircase’.9 It also pierced the balcony floor with a spiral staircase that led down into two basement rooms and even further down into a cistern shaft, ending just above the water level.10 Schwitters’s methodology or ‘merzing’ was characterized by discovering and gathering material in order to accumulate, paste, layer and rearrange it untiringly in a highly site-specific and expansive inhabitable structure. Schwitters used this method in his Merz paintings/pictures (Merzbilder) and in the Merz structure (Merzbau), his largest spatial collage. ‘Merz’ was Schwitters’s interpretation of Dada art, and he continued to develop it from 1918 until the end of his life in 1948. Schwitters was intensely public about his Merz ‘movement’, even going so far as to describe it as a one-man political party.11 He promoted Merz passionately in his visual work, his performative poetry readings, and in a series of publications such as the Merz journals with invited artist collaborators. However, the Merzbau – his lifework and poster child of the Merz movement – was an uncharacteristically private project. This privacy had been necessitated by circumstances that were at once political, contextual and personal. First, Schwitters had to navigate Nazi surveillance. When he was labelled a degenerate artist (entarteter Künstler) by the Nazis, he whitewashed the windows of his studio for protection. Recent scholarship has shown that Schwitters ‘suspected for some time that he had been shadowed by the Gestapo, and that his incoming and outgoing mail was being screened for information regarding his political activities’.12 During that time of surveillance, Schwitters was ‘utterly depressed’ since he ‘could

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not show his studio to anyone’.13 Secondly, the Merzbau was accessible only to those who visited Schwitters at home, further adding to its private nature. Finally, the grottos distributed within the Merzbau reflected the sensitive and intimate inner life of the artist.

Private grottos The Merzbau harboured an increasingly dense private life even as it expanded beyond the perimeter of the house. The ‘lovingly’ and ‘triumphantly’ salvaged material made its way from the outside (the urban context) into Schwitters’s house to form internalized spaces of encapsulation and preservation.14 Inside numerous cavities comprising ‘at least forty different grottos, rooms, and caves’, Schwitters assembled thematic still lifes.15 These constituted what one might call an extremely personal – to some, even perverse – archive. This collection preserved artefacts and representations of Schwitters’s friends, colleagues, fantasies and fears. For instance, there were caves devoted to the architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the artists Hannah Höch, Kate Steinitz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jean (Hans) Arp, Naum Gabo, Theo Van Doesburg, Sophie Täuber-Arp, El Lissitzky, Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann and Piet Mondrian.16 Besides these kinship grottos, there were others dedicated to a variety of personal and cultural themes. If the entirety of the Merzbau is visualized as a kind of cloud consisting of the externalized dataset of Schwitters’s mind, then the grottos form topicmodelling clusters around certain key (search) terms. In Ich und meine Ziele (1931), Schwitters lists a few of these wide-ranging topics that include ‘the Nibelungen Hoard with the glittering treasure’, ‘the Ruhr district with authentic brown coal’, ‘the Goethe Grotto with one of Goethe’s legs as a relic and a lot of pencils worn down to stubs’, ‘Persil adverts’, ‘the Sex-Crime Cavern with an abominable mutilated corpse of an unfortunate young girl’, ‘an art exhibition with paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo and myself being viewed by a dog on a leash’, and ‘the great Grotto of Love’.17 For these grottos, Schwitters selected and curated cut-outs from newspapers, found trinkets, and a multitude of items including his wife’s bust and the plaster death mask of his infant son Gerd.18 The idiosyncratic constellations created unexpected, sometimes grotesque, associations and formed private odes to the shadowy intimacy of the artist’s inner life. The most secret grottos were only seen by three people: Sturm gallery owner and critic Herwarth Walden, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and Dadaist Jean Arp. Schwitters wrote in Merz 21 that these were the only people who he believed would understand him and his Merzbau completely.19 His tone of lament hints at a sense of involuntary solitude. However, isolation seems to have been an innate strategy of the Merzbau itself, not just thematically but also spatially. The most prominent feature of the construct was a ceiling-high column designated the ‘Cathedral of Erotic

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Misery’ which contained several grottos. Other columns were mobile and could be moved to reveal or conceal niches. A small spiral staircase accessed the ‘Library’ replete with a chair, a table and bookshelves, while another led up to the ‘Nest’ where one could sleep.

Exposure and the inner life Like Schwitters’s grottos, the interiors of our minds are full of obscure symbolism, compulsive reminders, triggers of shame, webs of affinities, strange longings and bad ideas. Although these are usually suppressed or remain private in a hidden corner of our minds, they occasionally emerge as awkwardly phrased searches in Incognito Google tabs or on the Dark Web. Some literature suggests that Schwitters’s grottos can be read as the artist’s ‘diagnosis of the underlying pathologies of German culture’ or as an ‘exposure of Schwitters’s own fascination with the darker side of humanity’.20 A closer look at the most popular sites on the internet shows that there is significant overlap between the main online interests and ‘the dark side of humanity’ (if by this is meant an interest in other people’s private lives, pornographic content, drugs, the compellingly repugnant photographic depictions of crimes, disease and disaster). The sheer size of the deep and dark web – 500 times that of the surface web – together with the list of the most accessed sites bear witness to the commonness of potentially ‘dark’ interests.21 In the context of digital culture and big data, one can think of the Merzbau as Google threads which were disentangled and displayed physically. Schwitters’s inventory of grottos accordingly becomes a browsing history – an unfiltered stream of consciousness mixed with clickbait.22 The formulation of Schwitters’s grottos as inner life turned outwards into the cavities of the Merzbau is characterized by an extreme, if not excessive, conceptual and material personalization – for example, in the form of a bunch of dried flowers withering away in a vase filled with the artist’s urine. The personal coagulates as individual scraps and waste coordinated within the niches of the Merzbau and contrasts the structure built out of collectively produced, publicly disposed trash. Given this intensely (and partially forced) private nature of the Merzbau, one might speculate that its construction was in itself a way of dealing with a sense of isolation. The excessive privacy that Schwitters encountered behind the whitewashed windows and plastered walls of his domestic space alerts us to the deprivation inherent in privacy. Contradicting today’s mostly positive connotations of privacy as a human need and right, the political thinker Hannah Arendt described privacy as privation or deficit, as ‘the absence of others’.23 A completely private life, in her opinion, could never amount to anything concrete because, in private, the human being cannot fully appear. She explained: ‘The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.’24

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Against this sense of realness, ‘even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.’25 Schwitters shaped his thoughts and obsessions into concrete form which could be shared with others. He put the dark web of his mind on display. His grottos were the material witnesses of his thoughts, interests and affinities that metamorphosed his private inner world out of its ‘shadowy’ existence into a potentially reality. Social media appears to have a similar effect and might explain an underlying motivation for why users share quotidian nonsense and personal trivia on Snapchat and Instagram, participate in dance challenges on TikTok (#renegade), or engage in elaborate picture contests (#BetweenArtand Quarantine).26 Especially during the recent Covid-19 lockdowns around the world, social media seems to have helped to transform one’s obscure isolated life at home into tangible reality, one which can be shared, seen and liked by others. Our social networks conjure the promise of a public life of meaning. Schwitters never doubted his own public relevance. In Merz 21, he mused that even if his Cathedral of Erotic Misery might be condemned to obscurity, he would not remain unknown: ‘I know that I am an important factor in the development of art and will remain relevant at all times’ (Ich weiß, daß ich als Faktor in der Kunstentwicklung wichtig bin und in allen Zeiten wichtig bleiben werde).27 It was because of this belief that he made sure to collect all his work and notes, carefully packaged, signed and stored at different sites to avoid loss through fire or robbery.28

Networked grottos The grottos can be understood as part of Schwitters’s preservation strategy for later renown. They house physical traces of the networks of people that played a role in his artistic life. He individualized the niches of his friends, collaborators and colleagues with material remnants representative of them, similar to social media profiles. For instance, Schwitters stole a pencil from Mies van der Rohe’s desk, cut off a piece of Theo van Doesburg’s tie, and asked Dada-constructivist Hans Richter for a lock of his hair to complete their caves.29 In my interpretation, the grottos harness material agency in order to conjure connectivity. In such a reading, the Merzbau is an early crystallization of network thinking that was soon to be advanced by Norbert Wiener and the cyberneticians. The idea of the network underpinned Dadaism. Its carefully cultivated ‘extensive network of correspondence’ formed the global ‘home’ of the Dada movement.30 The same is applicable to Merz, which to some extent was embedded within the Dada network. Despite of personal differences with Dada founding member Richard Huelsenbeck which prevented his

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official joining, Schwitters was in touch with many Dada artists. This points to both the exclusive as well as generative nature of the network which was beginning to play an important role with the rise of mass media at the time. Schwitters referred to the vast implications of mass media in his writings: ‘Our times are essentially different from earlier periods because of the enormous increase in communications and the improvement of the means of communication and technological methods.’31 He deliberately harnessed the strategies of mass media in his advertising and literary work, such as when he ‘plastered’ posters of his famous poem An Anna Blume all over Hanover.32 Repeated performances (such as readings of An Anna Blume), the (re) printing of random Dada sentences (which were drunkenly shouted across a bar before finding their way into Merz and other publications), and the integration of older Dada work into new pieces resonate with media theorist Wendy Chun’s observation on social media networks ‘that have everything to do with communicating, but little to do with meaning’.33 Chun observes: ‘We repeat – we write, we read, we expose ourselves – to communicate this sense of community, to insist that this “we” is possible. Networks operate through repetition.’34 In Schwitters’s work, meaning was also ancillary to communication. For instance, the grottos function more as associative triggers than as embodiments of meaning. They create a basis of communication – a network. One might say that, to Schwitters, everything is sending out messages. It is up to the artist to read objects as media, such as a discarded bus ticket, which reveals trips around Hannover, or to create an exchange between a stolen pencil stub and a death mask. Schwitters explained the importance of recognizing and formulating connections through art: ‘Merz means creating relationships, preferably between all things in the world’ (Merz bedeutet Beziehungen schaffen, am liebsten zwischen allen Dingen der Welt).35 While Dada actively countered the traditional understanding of art and meaning through ‘haphazard juxtaposition’,36 Merz fostered relationships. In the context of big data, Dada and Merz strategies resonate with the triumph of correlations over causality for which the collage is an ideal medium: ‘Collage appears consistently throughout Dada not merely as the technique its participants overwhelmingly favoured but as a virtually philosophical position.’37 As the Merz artist gathered material, it was up to him to recognize the artistic in the banal and to collage meaning into his work.

Obsessive archival, collective trash: Data and trash Besides their role as communicative nodes, the grottos acted as time capsules or archives, periodically engulfed by newer interests, dialogues, friends and material. History and archive occupied an important and somewhat

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dichotomous position in the Dada movement in ways that also characterized Merz. Dada was determined to create something so novel that it could not be related to the past, even at the cost of art itself: Dada described itself as anti-art.38 Simultaneously, the Dada crowd meticulously chronicled their activities and communication, fuelled by the exuberance of breaking with the pre-Dada past. In the words of curator Catherine Craft, ‘the Dadaists were obsessed with history’.39 As the movement evolved and consolidated, earlier Dada work became integrated, recycled and reconsolidated into new works.40 The care given to preserving the artworks and assembling a continuously expanding Dada body of work ‘can at times give Dada the appearance of something like a vast archive’.41 As a one-man project, Merz used a similar approach: smaller Merz sculptures could be engulfed by the Merzbau and scraps from a Merz painting could be repurposed for the structure and vice versa. Once a piece of material had found its place in the Merzbau, it might be painted over and new layers of trash and debris would be assembled on top of it, thereby forming newer temporal strata on the archival process that governed Merz. Beyond the self-archiving Merz activities, Schwitters was, as mentioned earlier, adamant about the preservation of his thoughts. Schwitters’s wife Helma was put in charge of painstakingly documenting and archiving all of his paper traces. Tasked with this, she ‘saved, packed, tied and bundled thousands of manila folders’42 in their densely packed attic where ‘everything he had ever written was preserved’.43 Schwitters’s obsessive self-archiving seems in retrospect to anticipate the inherent mechanisms that govern big data. The attempt to trace the roots of the archive to big data leads inevitably to the work of cybernetician Norbert Wiener. As Schwitters was forced to abandon his Merzbau, Wiener was just beginning to formulate the tenets of cybernetics that underpin big data. Cybernetics is an ontology of becoming based on the premise that the universe is composed of feedback loops of information. Feedback denotes ‘being able to adjust future conduct by past performance’.44 Negative feedback is the corrective response to an input signal. While Wiener was working on a system that – like the Merzbau – favoured continuous updates over static archival, he was also obsessed with the documentation of his own life. Orit Halpern observes: ‘His archive at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] is a fascinating exemplar of a life turned into data. Carefully curated, every letter mimeographed and saved, it is as though Wiener was already preparing his life for transmission, assuming a seamless translation between personal experience and historical analysis.’45 It is no coincidence that today’s world of big data, shaped partly by early computing experiments such as Wiener’s anti-aircraft predictor and his cybernetics philosophy, is, like Schwitters, obsessed with archiving.46 We can even go so far as to read the Merzbau as an analogue version of a big data archive and Schwitters as an algorithm. All the random trash harvested from the public realm of the streets of Hanover can then be seen as converted

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from an unstructured data pool into meaningful information clusters – the grottos. Post-conversion, these were decipherable not only to Schwitters but also to his friends and critics, obscured only by an idiosyncratic layer of interpretation governing this human algorithm/artist. Fittingly, in the fourth Merz publication entitled Banalitäten (‘banalities’), Schwitters describes how Merz art must be discovered rather than created. Among a selection of poems that were ‘found’ by Moholy-Nagy, the first neatly summarizes what one might read as a Merz disposition towards time and, implicitly, archiving: Past: I had, You had, he she it had, we had, You had, they had. Future: I will have, You will have, he she it will have, we will have, You will have, they will have.47 The present tense is missing here, which is symptomatic of the merzing methodology that gathered trinkets from the past – discarded, out of date and out of use – and reassembled them into constantly evolving artworks that could themselves become material for future works. Today’s digital culture resonates with the missing present tense despite its all-pervading emphasis on instant immediacy. Chun writes: ‘New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards what we might call the bleeding edge of obsolescence.’48 Computing processes and most of our digital practices – ranging from Google Maps to emailing, browsing websites, scrolling through Instagram and swiping through dating apps – constantly rely on active ‘memory’ in order to enable the content of the next click or swipe. Memory in the digital world has transformed from a passive and stable site of removed preservation to a constantly activated realm of transmission.49 Media theorist Wolfgang Ernst explains that the ‘traditional separation between transmission media and storage media becomes obsolete’ since ‘storage is a transfer across a temporal distance’.50 Transmission and storage also converge in the Merzbau. There is thus an archival kinship between the Merzbau and digital archives. The Merzbau is like an active archive where discarded and, if it were not for Schwitters, forgotten artefacts become continuously reanimated in their ability to form nodal points within a communicative network of feedback loops. In the digital world, the concepts of memory and storage fuse together.51 Media memory compiles signals as data into ‘memory’.52 Similarly, within the human brain, there is nothing comparable to an archive in the traditional sense of temporal depth because there is no fixed chronology that overrides mnemonic order. Rather, as Ernst puts it, ‘memory is an enactment of immediate synchronization of distributed electromagnetic charges in the

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neuronal net’. He refers to Sigmund Freud’s speculation that the psyche ‘does not diachronically consist of layer above layer but from time to time reconfigures the order of memories’.53 The dynamic nature of the Merzbau resonates with both the active storage of computational processes and the human brain’s mnemonic procedures.

Temporally flat, materially deep Applied to the Merzbau, the conflation of personal memories in the grottos and a more collective, animated cultural archive of publicly available trash creates a (partially) self-referential system. In Burns Gamard’s words, as a ‘labyrinth of associations and inflections, the construction at once responded to the outside world while also remaining wholly removed from it’.54 The Merzbau was suspended in a sense of ever-actualizing flux between archive, memory and reconfiguration; it was a structure characterized by temporal flatness and material depth. The Merzbau functions as an archive in two ways. First, the Merzbau is an archive of Schwitters’s activities – his three-dimensional collaging process, the construction of grottos, and their subsequent burial beneath further layers of collage. Second, the Merzbau assembles objets trouvés as the content of a personal archive. In the first version, there remains a kind of chronological depth to the archive in that the older layers and grottos are more deeply buried than the newer work. In the second line of reading, Schwitters creates a flat archive that resonates with the digital archives of the present day. Rather than prioritizing chronology and topic coherence, they favour an ever-shifting cloud of associations and random spatiotemporal adjacencies. Ernst explains that the digital archive ‘dissolves into data flow’. It is ‘microchip-flat’, starkly contrasting with the pre-digitalization, chronologically, and materially ‘deep’ archives.55 As a ‘growth which did not cease to grow’,56 the project was ‘up to six layers deep in places’.57 As the layers piled up, the Merzbau became deeper in terms of material. Some elements were concealed while others came to the foreground or moved position, thus shifting the archival narrative. Newer elements were aligned with older material, to create a temporally flat archive that resonates with today’s digital archives of continuous transfer. The temporal synchronicity of the Merzbau conditions its topical correlations and is a feature typical of big data. In the world of big data, archives are visualized as an all-encompassing, ever-present, infinitely expansive ‘cloud’. The cloud is a spatial metaphor for archival material in data centres whose energy footprint is exponentially growing as more and more data is gathered and stored. The ever-changing morphology of a metaphorical cloud – just like the ever-growing Merzbau – evokes important qualities of an archive. A cloud is a ‘body without a surface’.58 It has no definitive outlines and can continue to absorb more and more data.

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It is a mobile vessel that contains but does not confine. As a spatial phenomenon that challenges traditional conceptions of place, boundaries, accessibility and permanence, the digital cloud raises the problem of an intriguing spatiality, comparable to that of the Merzbau. Like a cloud, the Merzbau, with its mobile elements and unchecked growth, continues to morph and shift, reconfiguring the spatial vicinities of the data it cloaks. As archives, Schwitters’s grottos anticipate the random correlations and compulsive preservation of today’s big data gathered under the umbrella term of ‘the cloud’. Like digital data points that are abstractions of their ‘irl’ (in real life) counterparts, Schwitters’s archive conceals the found ‘data points’ by painting them over with white paint. The data points thus become husks. The Merzbau can help us to concretize the cloud – like big data, the Merz data is characterized by ‘an increasing spatiotemporal entanglement’59 and a kind of archive fever.60 Memories and materials pertaining to disparate moments in absolute time are reassembled to create chronologically impossible adjacencies.

Conclusion Mass media, (ab)used as political propaganda during World War I, converged with mass garbage in Schwitters’s body of work and lifetime. Gemma Carroll writes: ‘Concurrent with the first mechanised and media war came the arrival of mass waste; and the turnover of ephemera from production line to rubbish heap was unprecedented as information became the most important weapon in the new arsenal.’61 Dada’s intercontinental fury directed at the cruelty of that war was intertwined with a reaction to mass media, mass manipulation and (mis)information. Their deliberate nonsense was a strategy to expose the underlying mechanisms of media warfare. The Dada agenda rings with especial urgency in light of contemporary fake news, disruptive conspiracy theories and political data scandals where profiling is abused in order to manipulate and weaponize sentiment in psychological operations masked as clickbait.62 Although Schwitters occasionally shrugged off material enquiries with ‘It’s all crap’, the collected and preserved items of the Merzbau seemed to him to exude Dingzauber (‘object magic’).63 Schwitters looked at the junk he found ‘the way children look at clouds’.64 A kind of enchantment with the possibilities inherent in data trash (when mined and run through enough algorithms) also characterizes today’s digital cloud, filled up to its bleeding edges with ever-increasing amounts of big data (in the form of texts, visuals, videos and sounds) and growing exponentially as it is fed by sensors, models, scanners, communication, etc. Much like Schwitters’s structure, today’s web consists to a large extent of collective garbage. Excreted and littered by the global public, data is mined by algorithms that machine learn their way through bias, glitch and

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preference, mostly mirroring the world view of their operators.65 Thinking with Schwitters’s Merz, I wonder whether reducing big data to big trash could offset its exploitation. Trash could pose an alternative to considering data as (private) property – as ‘property’ currently seems to be the only term that holds a complete loss of privacy at bay. Schwitters’s work offers an insight into the psychological forces at work in the expansive universe of big data. A close reading of the Merzbau with its inbuilt networks of privacy – veils of paint, hidden nests, buried shrines that contain harmless if unsavoury kinks, and bodily excretions – points to the root of data abuse: the absence of the public. Personality traits (boiled down to the ‘Big Five’) are extracted from private users and mirrored right back at them in the form of customized manipulative messages that will sway them in directions pre-decided by the private companies paying for the pop-ups. On social media where we create seemingly ‘diverse’ networks, we are stuck with people ‘like us’.66 While we copy hashtags, repost tweets and mirror influencers, our political opinions and shopping decisions are designed by bespoke micro-targeting. The world of social media is a gigantic Merzbau where we feel at home among collective trash and personalized memorabilia. When visitors stop by, they are not the public, but people like us. On social media, we are suspended in a state similar to what Arendt might describe as the ‘conditions of mass society or mass hysteria, where all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family, each multiplying and prolonging the perspective of his neighbour’.67 Whether big data is treated as trash or private property, it needs to be reinjected with the ‘public’ – that is, with a multitude of spectators with manifold sensibilities unrelated to our own.

Notes 1 For this text, I have drawn upon a variety of literature on big data in order to combine a technical understanding with a more psychoanalytical perspective and voices from media theory. See, for example, Jacob Johanssen, Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (New York and London: Routledge, 2019); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Big Data as Drama’, ELH 83:2 (Summer 2016): 363–82; Nancy K. Baym and danah boyd, ‘Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction’, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56:3 (n.d.): 320–9; and Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 2 Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 88. 3 Gemma Carroll, ‘The Ruin and the Ruined in the Work of Kurt Schwitters’, Third Text 25:6 (2011): 716. 4 Gwendolen Webster, Kurt Merz Schwitters: A Biographical Study (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 106.

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5 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 94. 6 Alfred H. Barr Jr, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (New York: New York Museum of Modern Art, 1936). 7 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 7. 8 Ernst Nündel, Kurt Schwitters in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 57–8. 9 Webster, Schwitters, 270. 10 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 94. 11 Webster, Schwitters, 240. 12 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 13. 13 Schwitters to Katherine Dreier, 25 November 1936, in Webster, Schwitters, 66–7. 14 Ibid., 107. 15 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 98. 16 Ibid., 97. 17 Kurt Schwitters, Merz 21 Erstes Veilchenheft (Hanover: Merzverlag, 1931), 116. 18 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 88. 19 Schwitters, Merz 21, 116. 20 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 97. 21 As of August 2020, the top six Google searches in the US were Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Gmail, Google and Pornhub. See Copy of Top Google Searches – October – NSFW, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ 1PD5LJjRlb0hkSMk-e216_NYJ5O-ZLMOqV8UNCOgxDY4/edit#gid=0 (01.09.2020). 22 For a contemporary version of Dada’s ‘wild-gewordenem Spießer’ online, see Jason Koebler, ‘Ruin Your Google Search History With One Click Using This Website’, Vice (blog), 10 June 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ bmvv9w/ruin-your-google-search-history-with-one-click-using-this-website. For more on the same topic, see Brigid Doherty, ‘The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada’, October 105 (2003): 73–92, https://doi. org/10.1162/016228703769684164. 23 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 58. 24 Arendt, The Human Condition, 50. 25 Ibid. 26 Derrick Bryson Taylor, ‘The Social Media Challenges Helping Keep Boredom at Bay’, The New York Times, 22 April 2020, sec. Style, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/22/style/challenges-social-media-coronavirus.html. 27 Schwitters, Merz 21, 116. Unless otherwise stated, the translations are my own. 28 Ibid.

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29 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965), 152, cited in Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, 160. See also Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 103. 30 Catherine Craft, ‘Dada: Paris, Washington and New York’, The Burlington Magazine 148:1240 (July 2006): 505. 31 Kurt Schwitters, ‘Modern Advertising’, Design Issues 9:2 (1928): 69. 32 Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1970), 41. 33 Chun, ‘Big Data as Drama’, 379. 34 Ibid. 35 Kurt Schwitters, ‘Merz’, Die Zone 1:4 (1924): 1. 36 Kurt Schwitters, Merz 4 Banalitäten (Hanover: Merzverlag, 1923), 41. 37 Craft, ‘Dada’, 506. 38 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art. 39 Craft, ‘Dada’, 506. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Webster, Schwitters, 111. 43 Ibid. 44 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), Kindle edition. 45 Ibid. 46 For a similar line of argumentation that links the Dada ‘hybrid’ to the cyborg, see Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of California Press, 2009). 47 Schwitters, Merz 4, 37–8. 48 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory’, Critical Inquiry 35:1 (Autumn 2008): 148. 49 See also Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 50 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 99. 51 Ibid., 185. 52 Ibid., 100–1. 53 Ibid., 101. 54 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 6. 55 Ernst, Digital Memory, 100–1. 56 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art. 57 Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 95. 58 From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, cited in Hubert Damisch, A Theory of / Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 124, 141, 218, and in John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds:

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Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 256. 59 Ernst, Digital Memory, 100. 60 For more on ‘archive fever’, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics 25:2 (Summer 1995): 9–63. 61 Carroll, ‘The Ruin and the Ruined’, 717. 62 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked’, The Guardian, 7 May 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy. 63 Webster, Schwitters, 158. 64 Karl Ruhrberg, ‘Vorwort’, in Kurt Schwitters (Ausstellungskatalog Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 15. Januar bis 3. März 1971 u.a.) (Düsseldorf: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1971), 3. 65 Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 66 Chun, ‘Big Data as Drama’, 370. 67 Arendt, The Human Condition, 58.

Bibliography Amoore, Louise. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2020. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barr, Jr, Alfred H. Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. New York: New York Museum of Modern Art, 1936. Baym, Nancy K., and danah boyd. ‘Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction’. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56:3 (n.d.): 320–9. Biro, Matthew. The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Burns Gamard, Elizabeth. Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. E-Book. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Cadwalladr, Carole. ‘The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Hijacked’. The Guardian, 7 May 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy. Carroll, Gemma. ‘The Ruin and the Ruined in the Work of Kurt Schwitters’. Third Text 25:6 (2011): 715–23. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. ‘The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory’. Critical Inquiry 35:1 (Autumn 2008): 148–71. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2011. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. ‘Big Data as Drama’. ELH 83:2 (Summer 2016): 363–82. Craft, Catherine. ‘Dada: Paris, Washington and New York’. The Burlington Magazine 148:1240 (July 2006): 505–6.

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Derrida, Jacques. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’. Diacritics 25:2 (Summer 1995): 9–63. Doherty, Brigid. ‘The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada’. October 105 (2003): 73–92. https://doi.org/10.1162/016228703769684164. Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Edited by Jussi Parikka. Kindle Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Google Docs. Copy of Top Google Searches – October – NSFW . https://docs.google. com/spreadsheets/d/1PD5LJjRlb0hkSMk-e216_NYJ5O-ZLMOqV8UNCOgx DY4/edit?usp=embed_facebook (01.09.2020). Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Kindle Edition. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2014. Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2015. Johanssen, Jacob. Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data. New York and London: Routledge, 2019. Koebler, Jason. ‘Ruin Your Google Search History With One Click Using This Website’. Vice (blog), 10 June 2016. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ bmvv9w/ruin-your-google-search-history-with-one-click-using-this-website. Nündel, Ernst. Kurt Schwitters in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965. Ruhrberg, Karl. ‘Vorwort’. In Kurt Schwitters (Ausstellungskatalog Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 15. Januar bis 3. März 1971 u.a.). Düsseldorf: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1971. Schmalenbach, Werner. Kurt Schwitters. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1970. Schwitters, Kurt. Merz 4 Banalitäten. Hanover: Merzverlag, 1923. Schwitters, Kurt. ‘Merz’. Die Zone 1:4 (1924). Schwitters, Kurt. ‘Modern Advertising’. Design Issues 9:2 (1928): 69–71. Schwitters, Kurt. Merz 21 Erstes Veilchenheft. Hanover: Merzverlag, 1931. Taylor, Derrick Bryson. ‘The Social Media Challenges Helping Keep Boredom at Bay’. The New York Times, 22 April 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/22/style/challenges-social-media-coronavirus.html. Webster, Gwendolen. Kurt Merz Schwitters: A Biographical Study. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997.

CHAPTER NINE

Identity, Ecology and the Arts in the Age of Big Data Mining Roberto Simanowski

Data love In 2011, the title of a Berlin conference called Data Love was justified in the following way: Today, data is what electricity has been for the industrial age. Business developers, marketing experts and agency managers are faced with the challenge to create new applications out of the ever-growing data stream with added value for the consumer. In our data-driven economy, the consumer is in the focus point of consideration. Because his behaviour determines who wins, what lasts and what will be sold. Data is the crucial driver to develop relevant products and services for the consumer.1 This emphatic promotion is affirmed by the classic business adage: ‘What can’t be measured can’t be managed.’ Both statements show that data love is in no way unconditional. It is devoted to data as information that gives a meaningful form to measurable facts.2 To be sure, ‘data love’ is a euphemism. It is the palatable alternative to the central concept of the digital-information society: big data mining – the computerized analysis of large collections of data intended to reveal regularities and previously unknown correlations. ‘Love’ refers to both aspects of the dual nature of the mining: corporations love big data because it allows them to develop customized products, and consumers love big data 183

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for the same reason. This, at least, is what the quotation proposes to us: mining data leads to added value for customers. Data love is a phenomenon not only of the society of control but also of the consumer society. And data love thrives on precisely the same data that security and privacy would claim to protect. At the same time, data love is embraced by internet activists who advocate free communication and proclaim as ‘principles of data-love’ that data must flow, must be used, is neither good nor bad nor illegal, cannot be owned, is free. This notion opposes ‘the misconceptions of politicians, who keep trying to establish exceptions for the expression of certain types of data’ – such as ‘hate speech’ or ‘child porn’ – and postulates an unconditional love of data regardless of that data’s nature or possible misuse: ‘Datalove is so exciting! It’s all about the availability of data. What people do with it is not the question. The point is: people need data. Need to get it. Need to give it. Need to share it. Need to do things with it, by means of it.’ This is another and different form of data love, conceptualized as a desire to know or even as a second wave of Enlightenment: ‘Datalove is about appreciation of being able to understand, perceive and process data altogether for the enjoyment and progress of all sentient beings.’ Business entrepreneurs and marketing experts can easily subscribe to this call for free data flow. What is missing in this enthusiastic embrace of data is a sensitivity to the potential for conflict between data mining and privacy. Claiming that ‘if some data is meant to be private, it should not reach the Internet in the first place’ sounds an awful lot like the rhetorically effective ‘nothing-to-hide’ argument one generally hears from intelligence agencies and big software companies.3 Those who discussed the NSA [National Security Agency] scandal of the summer of 2013 in the US only as a matter of the tension between the two basic rights to freedom and security are failing to see the more problematic or even aporetic aspect of the issue. The imperative of transparency implemented by social online portals, self-tracking applications, and the promises of the internet renders data gathering an everyday phenomenon. What is technologically feasible becomes all but universally irresistible. Naturally, this is especially true when it comes to intelligence agencies. But the same circumstances hold for the consumer economy and for those in charge of infrastructural government – that is, traffic control, urban planning, public health administration, etc. The majority of people are looking forward to all the promises of data mining. Herein lies the philosophical problem that goes beyond the political discussion of the NSA scandal. Data love leads to a double-edged potentiality: the reconciliation of society with its security apparatus. In the age of increasing digitization of human communication, the logical consequence for everyone is the so-called full take of all data on everyone and everything. Against our wishes and our declarations to the contrary, privacy in the twenty-first century becomes outdated. The effects of this unrestrained exploitation of personal data have been compared with ecological disaster. It is maintained that just as the individual

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use of energy is not a merely personal matter, so dealing with personal data has social consequences with ethical implications. A discussion from this perspective goes beyond the easy citizen-versus-state logic. However, simultaneously, it undermines our thinking through the problem in a new way. For while the ecological movement’s ethics are focused on the preservation of human existence – which no one would oppose – the concept of ‘data disaster’ basically operates in relation to a culturally conservative position for which privacy is a value that should remain untouched. This idea of privacy as an inalienable right is compromised by the willingness – not only of the younger generation – to give up personal data and, inadvertently, by all those who blindly agree to insidious terms of service. If, in the context of the NSA scandal, people have talked about a ‘cold civil war’, then this should be understood as a conflict within every citizen – namely, between an interest in data mining’s advantages and a fear of its disadvantages. The principal agencies of big data mining are the number crunchers and the data scientists whose current job descriptions increase in sex appeal and promise remuneration in the millions. Unnoticed and inexorably, their contributions to increasingly efficient methods of data management and analysis are changing cultural values and social norms. Software developers are the new utopians, and their only programme for the world is programmability, occasionally garnished with vague expressions of the emancipatory value of participation and transparency. The secret heroes of this ‘silent revolution’ are the algorithms that are taking over humanity. On the one hand, they increasingly assume ‘if–then’ directives, enforcing them immediately and relentlessly. On the other hand, they reveal more and more if–then correlations and, armed with this new knowledge, pressure society to intervene on the if level in cases of unwelcome then effects. The actual objects of fear are not NSA or Big Brother but predictive analytics and algorithmic regulation. They are kindred spirits of the technocratic rationality that was once discussed critically as the dark side of the Enlightenment under the headings of ‘reification’ and ‘lack of responsibility’. In the wake of big data mining the dangers of technocratic rationality reveal themselves imminently as promoting an increasingly statistical view of society. We need a discussion that goes far beyond concerns over restoring the security of email communication or text messaging – as the chief replacement for a legally and physically inviolable postal system – in the face of digitization and global terrorism. The larger question pertains to the image modern society has of itself and how willing society is to allow its data scientists and their technologies to reshape it. The question worrying many of those who are concerned with the cultural effects of the present technological development is this: what possibilities does the individual have to intervene in this process? The answer must begin with the recognition that we do not speak for the majority. As long as, for example, Google is able to present itself as the eyes of God in the sense of caring rather than overseeing and judging, then any protest against

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big data mining will raise objections from all those people who benefit from Google’s ‘care’. The debate on surveillance and privacy, instigated by the NSA scandal and later by the scandal about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, ignores this general complicity and agreement. We do want Google to know everything about us so that it can fulfil its customer care as effectively as possible – from personalized search results via geolocal recommendations to suggestions as to what we should do next. We agree that the smart things in the internet can only make our tasks easier to the extent to which they – and thus all who have access to their data – know about us. Disciplining the various intelligence agencies is the only common denominator upon which society can still part way agree. And not even in this case is everyone of one mind. One needs to ask why people as citizens insist on a private sphere that they blithely ignore as consumers. In this context, those who call for the rescue of the internet insofar as it is abused as a means of surveillance rightfully remind us of the hopes that were once associated with this new medium as a locus of emancipation and democratization. They also echo the intellectuals, today derided or forgotten, who back in the 1960s and 1970s called for the improvement of society, admonishing the disinterested people: There is no right life in the midst of a wrong one. Changing media is even harder than changing societies. Apart from the social realm from which they emerge, media have their own inherent agenda that they are determined to fulfil. With respect to computers and the internet this implies calculating, connecting, regulating. Big data mining is not a byproduct of media development; it is its logical consequence. It radicalizes the Enlightenment impulse for mapping and measuring, something that today is inevitable and unavoidable because anything that happens digitally will produce data. Data analysis – regardless of any particular regime of data protection that may be in place – is not a ‘car accident’ on the data highway; it is the actual destination. Data love – our love for data and its love for us – is the embrace that hardly anyone in this day and age can avoid. Data love is not the obsessive behaviour of overzealous intelligence agencies, clever businessmen and internet (h)ac(k)tivists, but rather the entanglement of all those who – whether out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism or passion – contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, eventually leading to the statistical evaluation and profiling of their individual selves.

Data mining business The society of the future will be a society of communicative capital. Anyone with a high degree of influence in forming opinions on social media will enjoy checking in as if they had booked business class; their rooms will be

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upgraded on arrival at the hotel, and they will be rewarded with perks in many other situations. ‘Perks’ was the name given by the San Francisco start-up Klout, founded in 2008 (and acquired by Lithium in May 2018), for the small extras that one receives, here and there, for a high ‘Klout score’. The Klout score indicated a person’s communicative importance, their ‘influence across several social networks’, on a scale of 1 to 100. The score was calculated from more than four hundred signals, including the number of followers, retweets, comments, likes, friends on Facebook, number of citations on the internet, and backlinks to a personal website. In the end one arrived at a score that could be compared with all the others, something that Klout called for explicitly on its Facebook site: ‘Invite your friends to compare your scores.’ A society that creates differentiations based on rankings and provides financial advantages based on communicative capital – which is close to social capital in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms – appears as a better alternative relative to a society that operates chiefly on the basis of economic power. However, this understanding will change when, given viral marketing, communicative capital becomes firmly integrated in the business models of hotels and airlines, and as communicative capital itself becomes commodified – through the purchase of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, for example. Whatever happens, it is an important sociological question demanding a wide-ranging critical discussion at least as soon as schoolchildren begin to select their friends, or companies their employees, based on the scores on likes, shares, friends and followers. For the media theorist, the phenomenon of scoring directly addresses a fundamental question of the discipline: does technology determine society or vice versa? Do computation and the internet impose scores on people, or do human practices make them inevitable? If society’s guiding medium already carries the drive to calculate in its name, and if, given the digitization of almost all communication on the internet, this medium has an everincreasing amount of data on the behaviour of individuals at its disposal, then everything seems to point in the direction of technological dominance. On the other hand, people’s interest in statistics and ranking did not originate with the rise of the personal computer. A paradigm change from qualitative to quantitative understanding can already be found in the late Middle Ages.4 In the contemporary public-management society that increasingly pursues its own rationalization – and even, for example, calculates the quality of scientific publications on the basis of citation indexes – the invention of an influence index in social networks is a logical consequence facilitated but not caused by computers and the internet. Regardless of how one answers this crucial question of media studies, one can hardly deny the prognosis: the society of the future will be one of data mining and number crunchers. Business analysts are now promoted as ‘data scientists’; statistics – once the domain of nitpickers – has become a profession with sex appeal. The super-crunchers are the superheroes of the

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twenty-first century, their names consistently popping up on the latest lists of up-and-coming millionaires.5 The generation of scores is not their most profitable activity, but it symbolizes perfectly the obsession with measurement within the ‘statistical turn’ that accompanies the digitization of society. The business of big data mining is distinguished by three distinct modes of operative agency: data owners who possess the data but do not analyse what they collect (Twitter); data specialists who help the data owners use their data most effectively through complex methods of analysis (Teradata, for Walmart); and businesses and individuals who gather information with original and unconventional perspectives or methods for which no one had yet thought of an application (FlightCaster.com predicting flight delays based on the analysis of ten years of data on flights and weather). The modes may overlap – for example, when MasterCard evaluates the accumulated data on the buying patterns of its customers and then sells its findings to advertisers – and business models can evolve: credit-card issuers may in the future allow transfers of money free of charge in return for access to or analysis of more data that they can sell on. At the same time, new business models emerge from the possibilities for recombining and reusing data, examples being ‘data intermediaries’ that utilize data acquired from different sources in an innovative way.6 The inevitable flip side of data love is an indifferent, if not hostile, relationship with the world of human privacy. At the precise point when data entrepreneurs dig into the vast depth and extent of the accumulated data in order to claim the treasure of a promising competitive advantage, petty, individual concerns of privacy will be in the way of their spirit of discovery, just as the aged couple Philemon and Baucis, in Goethe’s Faust, stood in the way of modern-day business practices. An important part of big data business is, therefore, the management of mood. The subjects or objects of the data – our choice of terminology depending on whether, for instance, one attributes the production of GPS data to the user of a mobile phone or to its provider – have to be convinced of the entrepreneurs’ good intentions – namely, that their goal is to develop better products and to offer improved customer care, as the announcement of the Data Love conference declared. One has to convince the potential customer to see big data mining as the great adventure of our times, an adventure in which everybody is obliged to participate. For, in contrast to former times, when courageous businessmen embarked on dangerous voyages, risking their lives for potential gains, the entrepreneurs of big data business must take the entirety of society along for the ride.

Social engineers without a cause ‘If you want to become a millionaire, you have to solve a one-hundredmillion-dollar problem’ is Silicon Valley’s rule of thumb. What’s up for grabs

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are the as-yet-overlooked niches in the data business, the so-far-untried methods for analysing data, and the ideas that no one has yet thought of. However, more important than solving a problem is convincing someone in the Valley that the product offered is the solution to a problem no one knew existed. The contrast between responsive solutions and proactive, enforced solutions is illustrated by the comparison between Farecast, an airlineticket-pricing app, and the Hapifork, a fork that records the frequency with which it is put to the mouth. The supervision of eating habits – evoking warnings when eating too fast – is, according to the start-up Hapilabs, the answer to digestive problems, heartburn and, above all, obesity. Since one only feels satiated twenty minutes after eating, eating too fast means eating too much.7 Who would have thought that innovations were still possible in the fork market – the design of forks has always appeared to be as perfect as that of books! On the other hand, a fork is just a mindless piece of steel or plastic, and although the ‘intelligent fork’ may have arrived too early for the taste of the masses, in the context of all the other tracking devices and smart things that measure and facilitate human existence, it could well be that soon we will find ourselves unable to live without it. Of course, most of the money is still spent on solving real problems, even though, from the perspective of cultural philosophy, the solution itself might be the problem. A good example is the app Summly, which algorithmically recognizes the key terms of a text and distils its essence in 400 characters. This is one way of responding positively to information overload: instead of having to go on an information diet, one acquires a tool for processing even more information. Dieting is the solution for digital immigrants who would rather read less text with more accuracy. The impetus for digital natives is to process more texts faster, and that is why Summly has been so successful, making its programmer, Nick D’Aloisio, born in 1995, the richest teenager in the world after Yahoo bought the app in the spring of 2012 for 30 million dollars. The promise of the app is not only textual concision but also a method for learning more, faster, because one doesn’t have to search for the core message of a text oneself.8 It is only possible to believe that Summly makes one smarter, as it suggests, if one translates ‘smart’ not as ‘intelligent’ but as ‘sly’ or ‘crafty’. It is indeed crafty to outsource information processing, which represents actual intelligence, to computing capacity. While Summly is one contemporary strategic solution to a current problem, other apps in data mining validate themselves through historical means. Reading, for instance, is shifting away from being an intimate cultural practice and becoming a social interaction, as when Kindle readers see the highlighting of other readers within a text and are able to add their own, or when an app like Readmill (before it was acquired by Dropbox) shares collective opinions on readers’ most beloved scenes. Social reading within digital media is reminiscent of book clubs in the later twentieth century and reading communities at the end of the eighteenth. The difference lies in the expansion and instrumentalization of the social aspect when one

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reads online, for now others, too, have access to the details of reading, others including those who may be uninterested in the books being read or in having any interaction with readers. These others’ sole interest lies in tracking current reading habits in order to optimize future books and marketing strategies for the products of publishing: what is being read when, how fast and how often; what is being marked, what skipped, which words are looked up, which facts are being googled. Social reading could be seen as a corrective for hyper-reading, as a return to reading more accurately by way of collective discussion. However, it should be considered that beyond the opportunistic rhetoric of transparency and interaction, these transparent readers are chiefly the representatives of commercial interests and requirements. Under the banner of product improvement, texts are to be made more pleasing so as to meet the expectations and needs of the reading public – and the same is true for film and video, given that their media businesses mine the viewing habits of millions of Netflix users, for example.9 At the end of 2014, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, ‘When the Art Is Watching You’. The lead image showed sculptures of torsos with cameras for heads.10 Friends of German literature will be immediately reminded of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (1908), when they think of artists gazing expectantly out of their works (in Rilke’s case, a headless statue) at observers. The well-known closing verse has given generations of literature students goosebumps: ‘for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.’11 But the Journal article isn’t about Rilke’s poem, or at least it’s about the poem only insofar as the modern, technical eye inverts his conclusion into its complete opposite. The audience isn’t being watched by the art, but rather by the mediators of art, the data analysts who evaluate the public’s behaviour: how often do they come to the museum, to which exhibitions, how long do they stand in front of which works of art, what do they buy in the museum shop? Then the tech people show the curators and art educators diagrams and tables to demonstrate which topics will ensure more visitors. And so in this case, ratings also rule in favour of the economy. The question is no longer, ‘What is meaningful in the history of art?’ but rather ‘What’s trending?’ This kind of data love is the death of experts and mediators at the very centre of high culture. From the perspective of cultural philosophy, such market-driven customization is counterproductive. Here reading is also understood as a conflict between author and reader, or between director and viewer, for the predominance of a reality model. Readerships and audiences can only win this fight when they lose it – that is, when they learn to see reality from a different, from a new, perspective. Seen from the viewpoint of the Frankfurt School, this would translate to saying that the pleasing piece of art cheats the audience because it does not offer a resistance through which he or she is enabled to become more than he or she already is, or, for that matter, is asked to change her life. The logic of this perspective claims that in the book or film or art

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market customer service should be aimed at denying short-term customer interests – that is, by presenting art that is worth the experience rather than that is trending and by not altering those passages that have proven to be resistant and obstinate in content or style but by reinforcing them. However, this suggestion would not only violate big data mining’s freeenterprise logic; it would also misapprehend the social status quo, whose central interest is hardly humanity’s exit from its self-imposed immaturity, as it may have been during the height of the Enlightenment and bourgeois humanism or in the Marxist social model. In our current circumstances the book is hardly seen as a medium for individual emancipation, even by intellectuals. The claim that self-development is in the interest of improving the world has long lost its political and philosophical credibility. Indeed, this loss of credibility was initially disguised, in the 1990s, by an internet that seemed to offer a place of utopian and heterotopian promise. But during the subsequent commercialization and disciplined reorganization of the formerly ‘anarchic’ medium, this hope was also lost. Under the banner of data love, what remains is only the promise of knowledge discovery in databases or, depending on how one sees it, the dystopia of greater control. Once a utopia of the social degenerates into the ideal of absolute measurement and efficient social administration, the protagonists of social change also change. The social engineers of the twenty-first century are no longer hommes de lettres with humanist ambitions. There are no longer writers to whom a Stalin dictates how they should reform the minds of the people. There are no longer artists expressing political guidance, nor political intellectuals who broach the subjects that society goes on to discuss. The social engineers of today are the software programmers, the number crunchers and the widget producers who are changing human life stealthily but thoroughly with their analyses and applications; they are the graduates and drop-outs of the computer and engineering sciences who influence future social values with start-ups like Klout and apps like Summly; they are the developers who are either unwilling or unable to judge the cultural implications of their technical inventions both because of the characteristics of their profession or simply because of their age: being young, many engineers have little experience with the complex structures of social life and the contradictory demands of human existence. Even if they were to have something to say about the consequences of their inventions, they take refuge in a calculated optimism that regards technology as, intrinsically, an amelioration of the human situation, something that makes the world a better place, as the Silicon Valley mantra goes, or they delegate responsibility to the users and politicians, claiming that technology is neutral, or they show a steadfast enthusiasm for the technical unknown. They may admit that new technology is not only full of promise but also comes with its perils, but they insist that it is, in any case, exciting, fascinating and fantastic. This willingness to take on risks, this blind embrace of change, represents a shift from the wariness of intellectuals towards the curiosity of inventors

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and entrepreneurs. What Hamlet in his famous soliloquy admits as a problem for thinkers is not necessarily a problem for tinkerers: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.12 Such a shift in power is not without its forerunner: Francis Bacon had already imagined it in his social utopia, Nova Atlantis, in 1627. Here it is no longer the philosopher occupying the centre of the ideal state (as in Plato’s Republic, for example) but the scientist constructing social life on the basis of empiricism and rationalism. The data scientist and the programmer are the postmodern descendants of Bacon’s scientists; however, their only plan for the world is that it must be programmable. These are social engineers with no convictions or agendas beyond ‘computationalism’, ‘softwarization’, and the datafication of everything.13 Are they to blame? How free are they not to pursue their intent? Do human beings have a choice not to invent?

Cunning of reason In his everyday life, Martin Heidegger avoided technology as much as possible, but in his writing he accorded it almost limitless power. In his essay, ‘The Question concerning Technology’, Heidegger repeatedly stresses: ‘Technology is a way of revealing.’14 Revealing, Heidegger adds, doesn’t usually happen in human beings or primarily by their actions: Does this revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But; neither does it happen exclusively in man, or decisively through man. Enframing is the gathering together that belongs to that settingupon which sets upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.15 The human being is thus less the initiator than the midwife of a technology that wants to be discovered or found. ‘The “initiative” to prove oneself,’ writes Gumbrecht in his book about the world-spirit (Weltgeist) in Silicon Valley, paraphrasing Heidegger, ‘proceeds from being not from the curiosity or interest of human existence.’16 The transferral of initiative and sovereignty from the inventor to inventions and discoveries has two major consequences for human beings. They cannot expect to derive any practical use from discoveries and must be prepared to accept that they will be alienated from themselves by them. Self-

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alienation is the dialectic opposite of the subjugation of nature, ‘the tragedy of modern culture’ noted the early German philosopher of technology Ernst Cassirer in his 1930 essay, Form and Technology. He added, ‘[A]ll creative cultures increasingly set out certain orders of things for themselves that confront the world of the I in their objective existence and in their beingsuch-and-such.’17 Cassirer’s moderately pessimistic view of culture and civilization harkens back to German sociologist Georg Simmel’s influential essay, ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’ (1911). In it, proceeding from a ‘cultural logic of objects’ and an ‘internal drive of all “technology’ ”, Simmel derives an intrinsic logic in all products of the human imagination, which future generations will find very difficult to escape. As a means of human self-control, technology is always simultaneously a selfdisempowerment. Using technology, human beings create a home for themselves in the world but are only sometimes the lord of their own manor. In Germany, this perspective was later popular, propounded by the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who understands the current intelligent age of machines as a recoupling of nature with itself.18 Most recently the assumption of an ‘essential self-propelling momentum pushing technology’ was popularized by Wired magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly. In What Technology Wants, Kelly writes: ‘The technium also wants what every living system wants: to perpetuate itself, to keep itself going. And as it grows, those inherent wants are gaining in complexity and force.’19 In keeping with these ideas, human beings are not the determining force but only the motors – and the ones who are driven – to reveal the concealed, regardless of whether it truly is useful, as they always hope and contend. The constraints may be anthropologically and socially determined: the curiosity of the inventor, the economic or military advantage of adversaries, should one fail to invent something. If we assume that there can be autonomously acting technology, it would seem logical that these determinations would be part of its strategy to ensure its own invention. The thought that human beings in everything they do are only fulfilling a preordained plan is by no means a product of the twentieth century or necessarily connected with technological inventions. It takes us back to Hegel’s world-spirit that uses people’s passions and particular interests so that they work towards its ultimate purpose in world history. Hegel called this the cunning of reason (List der Vernunft), which operates in the service of a higher necessity, the self-development of the absolute spirit. Napoleon in Jena in 1806 – that ‘world-spirit on horseback’ – is just as much a tool (Hegel speaks of ‘managing directors of the world-spirit’) of this higher, inscrutable plan as all the programmers, inventors and entrepreneurs in today’s Silicon Valleys. The ‘cunning’(or ‘duplicity’) of reason can be weakened, if people are made into a knowing tool, as happens in Marxist theories of history, which transform Hegel’s absolute spirit into a historical law. With growing consciousness and agreement, the contradiction between human instrumentalization and self-sufficiency also disappears. In the

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doctrine of historical materialism and its socialist application in reality, a contribution to the higher plan is simultaneously and explicitly an act of human self-emancipation. But Marx’ equation didn’t work. In 1989, work on the progression of social formations was discontinued after it was found to lead in several instances to repression rather than emancipation. In the current discussion concerning the relations of power between people and technology, we will be more likely to cite Hegel than Marx and see the telos of human action in the world-spirit as in communism. All the more so now that technology itself appears in the guise of AI as ‘intelligence’ which, as a potentially general intelligence, could correspond to Hegel’s absolute spirit. The question is whether the cunning of the absolute spirit resides in using human beings as a carrier in order to come to an intelligence that sublates – that is, ends and simultaneously raises to a higher level – human intelligence in the Hegelian sense. However this question will be answered in the future, there is hardly any doubt that our data love and the radical datafication of everything is the food on which deep-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence is thriving.

Notes 1 http://nextconf.eu/next11/next11-means-data-love (no longer online; grammar issues in the original). This article combines passages from my book Data Love. The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016; Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014) and my essay ‘On the Ethics of Algorithmic Intelligence’, Social Research: An International Quarterly 2 (2019). 2 The terms ‘data’ and ‘information’ do not differ quantitatively, as is suggested when referring to a bit of data as a ‘piece of information’, but qualitatively. Data (as givens or facts; datum in Latin) embody the lowest level in the chain of perception, preceding both information (as processed data; informare in Latin) and knowledge (as interconnected information or a ‘serial event of cooperation and collaboration’, in the formulation of Manfred Faßler, Der infogene Mensch. Entwurf einer Anthropologie [Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2008], 281, stressing the processual character of knowledge). From the perspective of perception theory, however, it is questionable that data (as givens before interpretation and the construction of meaning) exist for the observer. As an alternative to ‘data’, the suggestion has been made to use ‘capta’ (from the English ‘to capture’; captare in Latin) in order to keep in one’s mind the inevitable ‘taking’ of the given. See Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display’, Digital Humanities Quarterly 5:1 (2011), http://www. digitalhumanities.org/dhq/5/1/000091/000091.html. This term, though, subverts the difference between data and information (as processed data). Since the purpose of this article is not a terminological discussion, it may suffice to keep in mind the indicated difference among data, information and knowledge. 3 http://www.datalove.me; http://www.datalove.me/about.html.

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4 Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5 Thomas H. Davenport and D. J. Patil, ‘Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century’, Harvard Business Review (October 2012), http://hbr. org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century; Ian Ayre, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart (New York: Bantam, 2008). 6 On the job sharing of data mining, see Viktor Meyer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), ch. 7. 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boM3EAuz-oU; http://www.hapilabs.com/ products-hapifork.asp. 8 http://summly.com/publishers.html. 9 It is in exactly this framework of customization that Viktor MeyerSchönberger and Kenneth Cukier are surprised that Amazon does not sell its data on the reading habits of its Kindle users to authors and pub lishers: ‘For authors a feedback would be also useful; they would be able to track when the reader stops reading the book and they could then improve their texts.’ Meyer-Schönberger and Cukier, Big Data, 167. 10 Ellen Gamerman, ‘When the Art Is Watching You’, Wall Street Journal, 11 December 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-art-is-watchingyou-1418338759. 11 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (1908), in Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 67. 12 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1. A good example of how little tinkerers allowed their enterprises to be ‘sicklied’ by thought is given by Todd Humphrey, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory, in his TED talk ‘How to Fool a GPS’ in February 2012, while promoting equipping all objects with GPS-’dots’: ‘I couldn’t find my shoes one recent morning. And as usual I had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I shouldn’t have to bother my wife with this kind of triviality. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/todd_ humphreys_how_to_ fool_a_gps). The joke received the laughter hoped for in the TED talk and leaves little room for this troublesome objection: how much better it is to have to ask one’s wife than to risk that others, whom the wife would never answer, could ask the house as well. 13 In his The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), David Golumbia criticizes ‘computationalism as the belief in the power of computation, as commitment to the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human and social experience can be explained via computational processes’ (8). Evgeny Morozov varies this criticism in his The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), with the key terms ‘internet-centrism’ and ‘cyber-utopianism’ representing the conviction that all social problems can be and should be solved through the internet (xv). Later, in his To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013),

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Morozov reinforces his critique under the key word ‘solutionism’. The ‘softwarization of society’ is, among others, discussed by David M. Berry in his Critical Theory and the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), where Berry notes a ‘transition from a rational juridical epistemology to an authoritariancomputational epistemology’ and points out the presence of software engineers within their products: ‘their rationalities, expressed through particular logics, embedded in the interface and the code, become internalized within the user as a particular habitus, or way of doing, appropriate to certain social activities’ (12, 38). 14 Martin Heidegger, The Question. Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. with intro. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 5. 15 Ibid., 12. 16 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Weltgeist im Silicon Valley. Leben und Denken im Zukunftsmodus (Zürich: NZZ Libro, 2018), 78. 17 Ernst Cassirer, ‘Form and Technology’, in Aud Sissel Hoel and Ingvild Folkvord, eds, Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology: Contemporary Readings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 15–53, here pp. 34–5, 41. 18 Friedrich Kittler, ‘Friedrich Kittler im Gespräch mit Alexander Kluge: Das Ganze steuert der Blitz’, in Friedrich Kittler, Short Cuts (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2002), 269–82, here p. 270. 19 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 11, 15.

CHAPTER TEN

The Digital Revolution as Counter-Revolution Joshua Simon

If fascism follows a failed revolution, then ours is the failed digital revolution. RASMUS FLEISCHER, Co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Transmediale, Berlin, 2018

This essay will suggest the digital as counter-revolution – a class reaction aimed to restore a gendered and racialized supremacy, reliant on extractive powers of capital. An investigation of this sort relies on questioning the relations between technology, machines and the social and labour. Putting the real existing digital and its frontiers on a continuum of projects that are informed by extractive techniques of asymmetrical subordination and exploitation positions it within the framework of past expansive settler-colonial visions. By putting forth these considerations, this essay will expand on the relations between machine and revolution, innovation and counter-revolution, and the precedents of early modern visual inventions as they play out in digital innovation today. As this assessment unfolds, a shift in the field of the visual itself emerges. A shift which has its roots in past periods of art history. To say that what was deemed ‘the digital revolution’ is a counterrevolution might not seem self-evident, especially with the legacy of West Coast counterculture in mind. As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron wrote in 1995, the Californian ideology ‘has emerged from this unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter-culture radicalism and technological determinism’. Data mining and libertarianism, surveillance and free market, the California ideology operates contradictory modes of freedom and paranoia – from Charles Manson to Peter Thiel. In a piece that 197

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seems to foresee algorithmic predictive analysis (the sort that Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Peter Thiel of Palantir Technologies or Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica are known for), Barbrook and Cameron write: The Californian Ideology rejects notions of community and of social progress and seeks to chain humanity to the rocks of economic and technological fatalism. Once upon a time, west coast hippies played a key role in creating our contemporary vision of social liberation. As a consequence, feminism, drug culture, gay liberation and ethnic identity have, since the 1960s, ceased to be marginal issues. Ironically, it is now California which has become the centre of the ideology which denies the relevance of these new social subjects.1 Yet, even without engaging with the five big US technology companies, or FAAMG [Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google (Alphabet)], and their contribution to social calamity, economic inequality and political repression or their extractive financial models whose combined market capitalization amount to over $4 trillion,2 one cannot avoid the feeling that misogyny, racism and brute force have been amplified by the digital. Neo-reactionary trans-humanism, techno-libertarian digital-feudalism, Bay Area cyber monarchists and ethno-nationalists – these hybrid neologisms tell us where the digital is today. Ana Teixeira Pinto tells the story that when asked ‘what is the profile of the alt-righter?’, white supremacist Richard Spenser said it is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy, who’s working in information technology. When the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer gets most of its donations from Silicon Valley and Santa Clara County, home to some of the biggest tech companies, like Apple and Intel, this begs the question what makes the digital so disposed to fascism. To paraphrase Woody Guthrie’s slogan written on his guitar, ‘this machine kills fascists’, the digital machine makes fascists.3 ‘The Selfie Coup’ on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 provides a great example of digital polity. When the invaders arrive at the US senate floor, they yell ‘Where the f**k are they?’ but are eventually left to take selfies of themselves. Walter Benjamin writes on radio mediation in the essay on mechanical reproduction: ‘Parliaments, as much as theatres, are empty.’ In said essay (second version) Benjamin uses the term ‘compact-mass’, to describe a grouping of people that has the potential to either organize for communism or be managed by fascism.4 The pulses of violence and irritation that have been the characteristics of the attack on the US Capitol are those of buffering and parcelling – on the platform and on the Senate floor. With the ceremonial torching of TV equipment (Antenna) at the Capitol, we have the wave being replaced by the data package – literally, a compact-mass. The pulses of information, running along optic fibres and satellite triangulations, are a compact-mass – parcels of data that are shot at intervals (their lags or condensation appear as what we call buffering).5 The financial reality this

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media structure emulates is that of flow and capture. The events of the 6th of January unfolded live on TV without much documentation from the inside of the building, and then surfaced as short videos from inside. It felt both rushed and slow, brief and repetitive – streamed rather than broadcasted.

Is technology anything other than a weapon? Digital technology has not resolved conflicts. Technology is no longer an apparatus, but an environment. It is the ecosystem in which actions take place, not a mere device with which action is taken. The cybernetic scales which equated control and communication in the animal and the machine – as the full title of Norbert Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics book reads – have tipped.6 With the dominance of such contributions as Felix Guattari’s 1979 ‘The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis’, the animal is to be read within a broader machinic logic of abstract machines.7 In this respect, the Covid-19 global pandemic provides yet another twist, as the supposed natural is already subsumed into the machinic. The digital has proven to be our all-encompassing machinic operation, which stands for reality itself, while at the same time it has proven utterly incompetent in protecting us from a virus to which we are exposed as organisms, as animals. Countries and cities that have attempted to model their response on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies proved time and time again to have insufficient data (with asymptomatic spreaders obfuscating any accurate modelling). What we then got was overload of modelling and shortage of reality. This failure is telling of a whole technological thinking which occupies our social imagination. In this respect, even the vaccine, is a continuation of the pandemic by other means. Before Covid-19, technology was supposed to save the planet – we perceive operational technologies to be our sole agent for change for the better within our climate catastrophe, from plastic-eating wax worms, or the Internet of Things (IoT), to Barack Obama’s Climate Data Initiative.8 The climate catastrophe is fundamentally caused by exploitative social organization. While the triumphalism of the industrial age saw social forces as part and parcel of technological achievements, our age perceives the social to be unsolvable.9 The teleology of closed, self-regulated, purpose-driven security-systems has been internalized to wide spheres of personal and social life. It might be argued that never in history has technology meant so much as a separate category, outside the social. Subcontracting for-profit technological developments to compensate for total social and political incompetence is the inherent failure of technology itself, as it becomes yet another assault on the social as such. Technological solutions for social problems means simply that technology stands for the failure of the social. More often than not technology is the marker of the oppressor by default. An example of technology as disproportionate assault is its use in the hands

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of the Israeli military. Since 2018, footage has surfaced of military drones fighting kites flying on the border fence surrounding the Gaza Strip. Since 2006, the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coast is under blockade by Israel. As of March 2018, resistance movements in Gaza have been mobilizing youths to march to the border fence with Israel under the slogan, ‘The Great March of Return’, referring to the return of generations of Palestinian refugees to their land. The actual confrontation between human bodies and military technologies around the Gaza fence produced a variety of striking images. Searching for images of The Great March of Return online, one can find photos of David-like shirtless youths holding slingshots next to a wall of thick smoke from burnt tyres. This smoke is meant to be carried by the winds into Israel, where there is voluntary disregard to Gazans living under siege for over a decade. On the Israeli side, a Goliath armed to its teeth with US military technologies is barely seen, although, by the end of 2019, it ended the lives of 183 Palestinians and injured some 9,204 with canisters and snipers’ fire.10 The macabre footage generated by Israeli drones shows them trying to knock down Palestinian kites that were flown into the air carrying Molotov cocktails. Parallel to digging tunnels stretching under the border fence, Palestinian armed brigades of different factions and affiliations began sending kites tied to Molotov cocktails over the border. These crash into open fields on the Israeli side causing fires. The event of military drones fighting these kites begs the question of how such state-of-the-art technology of long-distancecapabilities supported by instant-satellite-triangulation has been reduced to a basic function of knocking down an object with its propellers. In the hands of a crude military tactic, the nature of this technology is revealed – preserving disproportionate control relations. Positioning logistics against strategy, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have argued that ‘drones are not un-manned to protect American pilots. They are un-manned because they think too fast for American pilots’.11 In the example from Gaza, we can observe how the achievements of aviation, space exploration, digitation and remote-control operations are stripped bare to make absolute logistics with no strategy. Drone technology here is nothing more than brutal force against the living: satellites sent out of the atmosphere only to block objects steering with the power of the wind here on earth; Lithium batteries developed simply to ram through light-framed toys flown in the open air; infrared wireless communications used to fight string threads. Within the state of affairs that this example highlights, we can say that our being-in-technology makes us more ‘logistical object than strategic subject’.12 This has been exposed fully during the Covid-19 pandemic, wherein ‘essential workers’ and ‘flattening the curve’ were basically logistical tools, while the social and economic costs on working people stifled any strategy.13 The real existing digital revolution is a counter-revolution practising abusive, exploitative destruction of the social, embodied by extractive masculine whiteness.14 With this in mind, we can recognize in seemingly

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unrelated phenomena the evidence for its destructive powers. While there is a decline in the last four decades in workers’ struggles in the industrial world – attempts to renegotiate at the point of production – we see an increase in local struggles at the point of realization and circulation – that is, in the market as consumers: from consumer boycotts to anti-gentrification movements, from rent-control demands to living-wages campaigns. With the decline of labour organizations as a social force, we are seeing around the world an increasing wave of femicide (in France, Israel, Mexico, Germany), where women are murdered by family members, relatives and acquaintances, many times when they are the sole providers of the family. This horrific reality corresponds with the tensions brought about on women both from the attacks of finance on labour, as well as from the offence of automation on reproductive labour. Within this context, one should recognize the digital’s assault on the social, as one which is experienced most harshly by women.

The machine as means to counter the powers of the social If one would like to still hold that these aforementioned examples of misogyny, racism, inequality and brute force are mere manipulations, or misuses of technology which somehow differ from their original design, we should then try to tackle what is the social and political meaning of machines under capitalism more generally. In order to understand the political and social function of technology, we therefore should go back to Karl Marx’s fragment on the machines. As Matteo Pasquinelli notes, these few pages have been ‘mobilised by many authors, including those outside Marxism, as a prophecy of different economic crises, especially since the Internet bubble and 2000 Nasdaq stock market crash’.15 In his famous lines on machines in the Grundrisse notebooks (1857–8), Marx writes of the general intellect: Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real-life process.16

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The machine, with its physical operations of steel and rubber, electric pulses running through silicon chips or liquid crystals, is therefore not simply a pure mechanical operation, but a social and intellectual one. What the machine harnesses is the general intellect that has produced it. That means not only the accumulated ingenuity and creativity of individuals, as capital’s orthodox historians would put it, but the general intellect, meaning the usages, shared innovations and techniques that people have developed as part of their labour. All this is seized by the machine. To give a steamengine-era example that pertains to labour power, we can say that for the twenty workers that were needed to do a certain procedure, there is now a machine that is doing the same work for half the time. In this respect, the machine, again, is both a social and intellectual operation as it folds in it an attack on those twenty workers’ social power to organize, and it is put forth with the intention to do exactly that. Italian Marxist philosopher Mario Tronti described this dynamic in relation to capitalist development thus: We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second. This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development is subordinate to working-class struggles; not only does it come after them, but it must make the political mechanism of capitalist production respond to them.17 Tronti’s proposition has been named a Copernican revolution as it posits the sites of action and reaction in a constellation unfamiliar in orthodox economics, and to conventional narratives of social developments. But were we to follow this scheme seriously, we would observe that the introduction of any machine can be considered a reaction to working-class advancements. Therefore, in our current debates over technology, even prior to metadata rights and ownership, before privacy breaches and corporate abuse, digital technologies should be recognized to be inherently devices for dispossession. As machines, they are always-already (as the phrase in philosophy goes) traps for capturing the social. In the fragment on the machines Marx himself described them thus: The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion.18 The enclosure of social potentials is the operation for which the machine is used. If the social provides a potential for revolution, then the machine is counter-revolution. The digital machine is no exception. What was called

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‘sharing economy’, in the days of digital ecstasy, has proved to be a euphemism for ‘gig economy’ (mechanical-Turks, gypsy cars, etc.). At the heart of it is a technology that we attribute to digital properties – outsourcing, platform services, micro-tasks. This technology pertains not to this or that serial algorithm, but to the shifting of costs onto workers. From people having no sick leave, to teachers using their broadband and laptop at home to teach, households have been providing all services of reproductive and productive labour during the Covid-19 pandemic. We can therefore recognize with Covid-19 an expansion of the logic of app-managed jobs, which are nothing new since the introduction of machinery.19 This has a long history in computing. Even before the personal computer, with the development of UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer in the US in 1951, people were seen as its deliberate raw material. From payroll to voting results, UNIVAC was processing information on human labour and political choices. This while replacing human labour done up until then by thousands of clerks. Behind this and every attempt at automating production or processing information lies the unconscious drive to usurp human function in the quest for a perfect slave, who would function and produce with no demands – as the old Slavonic word, robota, states literally: ‘enslaved worker’. Full automation, even when not entirely achieved mechanically, is another word for exploitation as it entails extracting machine-like work from humans treated as automatons. One can observe this in our cities: although self-driving cars have yet to be perfected mechanically, they are in operation socially with driving and delivery apps.20 Marx summarized this by saying that, under capitalism, the productive powers of labour appear as the creative power of capital.21 In this sense, any engineering is social engineering – the reality of technology being a counter-force in the service of capital-suppressing social forces, is complemented by the same technology’s capacity to prefigure itself in the social-attribute autonomy to man-made machines and make us treat others like automatons and behave as such ourselves. To paraphrase Andrey Platonov, the relation between society (he writes ‘nature’) and technology is, in principle, tragic.22

The social as obsolete under the digital ‘To be preoccupied with the aesthetic properties of digital imagery, as are many theorists and critics, is to evade the subordination of the image to a broad field of non-visual operations and requirements,’ writes Jonathan Crary.23 This is a telling insight on where power is today – in derivatives, algorithms, meta-data; all non-visual entities, unattainable by the human eye. In an age where power is supposedly impossible to represent, from finance to surveillance and bio-technology – DNA, meta-data, derivatives – we who are working in the field of the visual are compelled to renegotiate our understanding of vision and power. To push further this point of action

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and re-action, we can observe that the digital not only generates reverse relations between automaton and human, but also between module and reality. In her The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff emphasizes the influence of Harvard behaviourist B. F. Skinner, and his notions of ‘conditioning’ and ‘reinforcement’ to inducing behaviour change, on digital technologies. When she writes about Google’s location history system, Zuboff explains that ‘this was represented as an individual’s investment in personalized services such as Google Now so that it might more effectively comb your e-mail and apps in order to push relevant traffic and weather updates, notifications, suggestions, and reminders. Location data is the quid pro quo for these services.’ This product of the corporation’s global mapping operations was unveiled to the public only in 2015 although active a decade earlier. Zuboff notes that the ability to visualize one’s ‘realworld routines’ on their ‘timeline’ was a calculated risk for Google when it comes to consumer privacy concerns, as ‘any negative reaction to the volume and persistence of tracking revealed by Timeline would be mitigated by the value of users’ active contributions to their own stocks of behavioural surplus as they fine-tune the information, add relevant photos, insert comments, and so forth’.24 Zuboff goes on to describe products such as Roomba by iRobot and Google’s Smart Home service Nest, as she shows that the apartment is being scanned, not to better the conditions in it, but to expand on the costumer’s online presence, through mapping and surveillance in the service of prediction and modelling that would be implemented through the consumer’s conditioning of behavioural reinforcement online.25 ‘The entire world’s actions and conditions will be rendered as behavioural flows,’ she explains: Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts and situations.26 Reality is a simulation for data collection. Real-world activity a test site or laboratory for measuring consumer behaviour. What was once shopping is now ‘customer journey mapping’ for online application.27 The prediction imperative of online operations transforms experience to data, and in that expands its assault on the social. Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra should be therefore understood literally, not as a metaphor; the Borgesian map as well. In both cases, the possibility of a reality holding any social or political agency disappears. Media enthusiasm with the dawn of the computer era saw some big art exhibitions such as ‘Cybernetic Serendipity – The Computer and the Arts’ (Curator: Jasia Reichardt; ICA, London; Exploratorium, San Francisco, 1968) and ‘Information’ (curator: Kynaston McShine; MoMA, New York City, 1970), highlighting the possibilities the digital age holds. But by the time the personal computer has been positioned at the heart of the digital

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revolution, the path has already been determined. Bill Gates’s ‘Open Letter to Hobbyists’ in the January 1976 edition of ‘The Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter’ presents the logic Barbrook and Cameron have criticized. In his open letter, Gates, already co-founder of Micro-Soft, but still based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, expresses a simple idea: let us make software a licensed commodity like hardware. He wrote: As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? . . . Most directly, the thing you do is theft.28 As we have seen with Microsoft’s software licensing policies in our own private lives working on computers for our livelihood, instead of the digital revolution replacing social, political and legal constraints used by the thenexisting power structures, they have done the opposite. In place of free interactions between autonomous individuals and their free software, as promised, the real-existing digital revolution has become an endeavour of reterritorialization for extractive profit. The effects of the digital are pervasive in mental, productive, economic, political and social realms, and in all those realms it abides to a logic of extracting profit through expropriation. In more general terms, we can find it animating neocolonial dynamics along a continued history of economic and political frontier projects professing settler becoming.

Counter-revolution: The early modern period as antecedent In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, Pierre Menard, a twentieth-century fictional French writer living in the twentieth century is writing Cervantes’s 1602 Don Quixote, which he is re-creating, line by line, as a literary exercise. There is something of Borges’s Pierre Menard in the way contemporary digital visual technologies are re-creating what has already been achieved in art history since the early modern period. In a now well-known essay, filmmaker Hito Steyerl quotes a software developer who explains to her that, on our cell-phone cameras, ‘the lenses are tiny and basically crap, which means that about half of the data being captured by the camera sensor is actually noise. The trick, then, is to write the algorithm to clean the noise, or rather to discern the picture from inside the noise’.29 What we get is an approximate visual rendering based on previous photos. This can be called simply a memory image, since in order for the image to appear, it relies on existing footage taken by the same user.30

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Yet, neither this form of connectivity nor this form of image-making are new. When the print revolution was raging, Martin Luther addressed the nature of printed images of saints as he understood these to be. In his sermon of 31 October 1529, Luther spoke of what he called Groschenbilder, cheap, mass-produced woodcut prints with crudely drawn motifs. He called them Merckbilder (literally, ‘images of memory’) and said: ‘You do not pray to Groschenbilder, you do not believe in them – they are images of memory.’ For him, the depiction rendered in these images is not a representation but is there to remind us of something we already know. For him, this was precisely what an image should do. The correct function of an image was not primarily to represent something in a visually convincing way as if it embodies it (for example, in a religious icon), but rather to refer to something, to remind us of something – in this case, the Word of God or the dogma.31 The Merckbilder of Luther invites us to ask what are our digitally engineered memory images reminding us of? What is the dogma to which they refer, no matter what exactly they depict? This supposed anachronistic departure into the theological origins of digital practices is done here in order to suggest a historical consideration for our current moment. In light of half a millennium of thought and work around images and their production, we see how our digital revolution is not a revolution at all. The memory image is but one example which invites the consideration of an array of supposed cutting-edge technological tools in the lineage of a much longer art history, together with its settings and imperatives. Exploring these will give us a way into the extended duration of protocols and practices that inform our current digital counter-revolution. A dense seventeenth-century experimentation impulse seems to anticipate our age. What we consider augmented reality technologies is simply an attempt to re-create Paris monk of the Minim order Jean-François Niceron’s experiments in anamorphic images and lens-based composite images in his 1638 ‘La Perspective Curieuse’; corneal imaging systems of the past few decades are variations on Caravaggio’s use of concave mirrors; the protocols for 3D scans to 3D prints (without lasers and synthetic polymers) were invented by Pope Urban VIII when he commissioned Anthony Van Dyck to paint Charles I in Three Positions (1635–6) and then shipped the canvas to Rome where Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted a marble bust according to it (1636); notions of machine vision inform Velásquez’s Las Meninas (1656) where the mirror creates the image; Masahiro Mori’s 1970s concept of uncanny valley is already applied in Goya’s Straw Manikin (1791–2). Strangely, this world of digital imaging is familiar to art historians. Of all things, it might be art history that lets us into the invisibility of the digital age. As we have moved from textual to visual to spatial media operations, our current phase reiterates the previous stages. Interestingly enough, a lot of what is being developed technologically these days is already informed on some level by the achievements and discoveries of artists of the early modern period.

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Artists’ work, it appears, has informed the technologies of the digital age. The geometrically projected perspective of Leon Battista Alberti, for example, is a visual tool that can convert the infinite distances in space into a painting, compressed in a finite and measurable surface. Using a different technique, this is also the logic of the map, and also that of the interface. The interface is one form of map, in that its mode of operation is based on information reduction of elements from the world into a synthetic diagrammatic image that has a specific navigational function. From the vanishing point in a painting, to coordinates on a map, to navigating through a digital interface, we shift from pictorial correspondences of space to spatial renderings of reality. The political and religious thinking that informs these artistic attempts is worth considering. For example, when we think of AI, we must understand it as a political metaphor and machine (operational and social). As a political metaphor, the origins of AI can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s notion of the Artificial Soul – a construct he devises to describe the sovereign of the state as an amalgamation of what he termed ‘natural persons’ (the multitude that makes the gigantic figure in the front piece made by Avraham Bosse for Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651).32 In the introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes writes: Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings, and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, (in Latin Civitas) which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.33 For us, AI therefore stands as a metaphor of the corporate machine that controls us through pattern recognition and targeting us as automatons. At the same time, as a machine, AI is again a metaphor as any machine is. As Tronti teaches us, technology as an existing reality – as its use – is an outcome of the conditions of the division of labour. These conditions of division of labour do not simply precede it but are also generated by it. Therefore, any mechanic technological device or apparatus is a metaphor that encodes in it the tensions of the division of labour that preceded its introduction to social production. What the technology then does is to amplify these conditions

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back to us as tensions that we then experience as the setting, the stage, the reality upon which division of labour conditions are developing. In short, AI, recognized as a follower of Hobbes’s Artificial Soul, teaches us that a machine is a political metaphor and that a metaphor is a political machine. To further familiarize ourselves with the form of settler becoming of the early modern period, Sylvia Wynter provides a framing of 1492 not as a rupture, but as a continuum. She goes back to the principles guiding the Portuguese arriving in the Canary Islands in the fourteenth century and today’s Senegal in West Africa in the early fifteenth century to show that the same logic informing Christopher Columbus upon his encounter with the Taíno in Haiti was already at work in an evolving Portuguese colonial mercantile network of expropriation and enslavement.34 By positioning the African presence in the Americas as a precursor – rather than an outcome – of the colonization of the New World, Wytner offers us a model for understanding enslavement as the core project of colonization, not its byproduct. The extractive logic of digital technologies is driven by the reterritorialization of supposed frontiers. Both the repression of the social with operational logistics and the confinement of the self for the purposes of data mining, together with the revelling of the tech entrepreneur, all resonate the settler logic of colonial seizure. The long duration of colonial expropriating protocols we encounter under the conditions of the digital invite a reading of what is called technological innovation from the perspective of art history. This is because in art history we find the blueprints and desired results of many of our current digital technologies. As we look around us to see what is attempted in the processes of machine vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence and virtual reality developments, a strange feeling emerges in those who are familiar with art history – and more specifically, the history of art of the baroque. This artistic style that had been developed during colonial expansion, and as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, stands as a unique phenomenon that involves a variety of attempts at developing visual apparatuses that remake the world. With all its supposed newness, the digital world has as its ideological drive the same underlying logic of settler frontier colonialism, which makes it the evident realization of capitalist imaginaries. Therefore, the digital can be considered outside of its perceived direct application and through materialist histories of art that expose its function. The event of drones vs kites, which the drones themselves document, and which opened this essay, allows for an opening to a whole array of power relations that inform our existence in the digital. The same goes for our lithium batteries and the 2019 military coup in Bolivia against socialist Indigenous president Evo Morales, or the ongoing civil war in the Congo and the cobalt in our mobile devices. With machine vision and the operations of power unavailable for us to visually perceive, Benjamin’s famous remark that fascism aestheticizes

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politics while communism politicizes art seems yet again relevant. This time, through the digital, the aestheticization of politics is brought to perfection by the disappearance of political power itself from the human eye.

Notes 1 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, ‘The Californian Ideology’, Mute 1:3 (September 1995), www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology. 2 See Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2017); and Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). 3 See Ana Teixeira Pinto, ‘Artwashing – on NRX and the Alt-Right’, Texte zur kunst 106 (June 2017): 162–70, https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/ artwashing-web-de/. 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version, May 1936)’, in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, eds, Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. 5 See Neta Alexander, ‘Rage against the Machine: Buffering, Waiting and Perpetual Anxiety’, Cinema Journal 56:2 (Winter 2017): 1–24. 6 At the heart of our cybernetic understanding is a shadowing of an enemy on a battlefield. Coming out of the ‘anti-aircraft predictor’ in the Battle of Britain, cybernetics based its concept of feedback on the precondition of an enemy. In short, the natural state of affairs perceived by cybernetics is one of all-out war. See Peter Galison, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 228–66. 7 Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis [1979] (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011). 8 What is called ‘The President’s Climate Data Initiative: Empowering America’s Communities to Prepare for the Effects of Climate Change’ in the White House papers is a telling example. Inviting among others Google, Intel, Microsoft, the World Bank and Esri to provide solutions through their services seems to prove the problem, its causes and potential solutions were gravely misunderstood. See https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2014/03/19/fact-sheet-president-s-climate-data-initiative-empoweringamerica-s-comm. See also Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on his attendance at the now mythological 1970 International Design Conference at Aspen, Colorado: Jean Baudrillard, ‘Design and Environment, or, How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz’, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos Press, 1981) 185–203. For further reading on Baudrillard in Aspen, see Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007), 209–45.

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9 See Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1970). 10 See Médecins Sans Frontières report: MSF, In Focus: The Great March of Return, https://www.msf.org/great-march-return. 11 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (London: Minor Compositions, 2013), 88. 12 Ibid., 89. The targeting by military, police and marketing creates a meshing of individual and pattern by which strategy is impossible, and only logistics are possible. See Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of The Drone (New York: New Press, 2015); and ‘The Art of Logistics’, in Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, eds, Cartographies of The Absolute (London: zero books, 2015), 190–217. 13 See Joshua Simon, ‘The Tiny Hands of the Market: Social Distancing Without Society’, Social Text Online, 16 June 16 2020, socialtextjournal.org/periscope_ article/the-sign-language-of-the-tiny-hands-of-the-market/. 14 See David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Queerying Homophily’, in Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer and Hito Steyerl, eds, Pattern Discrimination (Minneapolis: Meson Press and University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 59–98. See also: Alberto Toscano describes the resurgence of ‘Late Fascism’ as one that reacts not to any egalitarian revolution but resulting from the liberal foreclosure of emancipatory politics (communism in particular). See Alberto Toscano, ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, Historical Materialism (blog), 2 April 2017, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism. 15 Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘On the Origins of Marx’s General Intellect’, Radical Philosophy 2:6 (Winter 2019):45. 16 Karl Marx, ‘The Chapter on Capital’, Grundrisse, Notebook VII [1858] (London: Vintage Books, 1973), 706. 17 Mario Tronti, ‘A New Type of Political Experiment: Lenin in England’ [1964], Workers and Capital (London: Verso, 2019), 65. 18 Karl Marx, ‘The Chapter on Capital’, Grundrisse, Notebook VI [1858] (London: Vintage Books, 1973), 693. 19 See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II [1885] (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), 109–18. 20 If we think of Situationist dérive experiments of urban psychogeography as the precursor for Uber-pool, we can also perceive Robert Smithson’s milestone land art piece, Spiral Jetty, in the Great Salt Lake, Utah (1970), as a model for the Palm Island off Dubai in the Persian Gulf. See Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism (Berlin: Sternberg Press), 144. 21 Marx, ‘The Chapter on Capital’, 308. 22 Andrei Platonov, On the First Socialist Tragedy [1934] (New York: New York Review Books, 2012), 154.

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23 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 47. 24 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019), 243. 25 I thank Zachary Formwalt for his insights on ‘consumer journey mapping’. 26 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 210–11. 27 See Jung-Joo Lee, Ilpo Koskinen and Jack Whalen, ‘Multiple Intelligibility in Constructive Design Research: The Case of Empathic Design’, International Journal of Design 14:3) (2020): 55–67. 28 Bill Gates, ‘An Open Letter To Hobbyists’, Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter 2:1 (January 1976). 29 Hito Steyerl, ‘Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise’, e-flux Journal 60 (December 2014), www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61045/proxy-politics-signal-and-noise. 30 Mario Carpo explains that Google does not scan the entire World Wide Web anew for any alphanumerical combination typed into their search bar. Instead they show search hits customized to each user based on their previous searches. See Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2017), 170–2. 31 For the nature of this protestant formulation of image-making, see Hanne Kolind Poulsen, ‘Branding King Frederik II : On Melchior Lorck’s Engraved Portrait Of Frederik II ’, SMK Art Journal 2006 (2007): 86–95. 32 Susanna Berger mentions that Thomas Hobbes and Abraham Bosse frequented the Minim convent in Paris where Niceron’s device was displayed in the library, as they went to visit Père Marin Mersenne, a key figure of intellectual life in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. Hobbes even mentions the device in a letter from 10 January 1650. See Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 196. 33 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], edited with an introduction and notes by J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. 34 Sylvia Wynter, ‘1492: A New World View’, in Sylvia Wynter, Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, Eds, Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View (Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 9–14. Wynter, on p. 9, quotes Paolo Taviani who tells the story of Columbus’s visit to the Portuguese fort at El Mina in West Africa in 1482. Paolo Taviani, Columbus The Great Adventure: His Life, His Times, and His Voyages (New York: Orion Books, 1991).

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Kemang Wa Lehulere

Dog of Orion

The Dog Star, Sirius, is the brightest in the southern sky. Obediently it follows its master Orion across the sky. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s sculpture Dog of Orion casts youth in a state of rebellion not obedience. The work signals a generation’s battle for mind and imagination amid lingering colonial narratives. Many of Wa Lehulere’s sculptural works repurpose old wooden school desks with surfaces scratched by past students. As punishment for his ungovernable behaviour, the artist was often tasked with sanding out those marks of disaffection during school detention.* Crutches made from scratched school desks that stick out of an old car tyre reference a poor child’s readymade toy, a tyre pushed by two sticks. Stacked on top of a velvet cushion shaped as a graduate’s tasselled hat that crowns a wooden sculptor’s stand, the artist inverts the hierarchy implied by the status of higher education. The work references a youth crippled by legacies of apartheid education, the Soweto student uprising of 1976 and tyre barricades of the 1980s. In reference to this work, Wa Lehulere cites the poem ‘Guava Juice’ (referring to the pink petrol bomb) by renowned writer Sandile Dikeni (1966–2019). During the turbulent political conflict of the 1980s students at the University of the Western Cape adopted the poem ‘Guava Juice’ as a rallying cry of the liberation struggle: shake shake my comrade shake that invention of the working class shake that unifying medicine before it’s too late shake before the time come to pass shake that guava juice Extract from the anthology Guava Juice (Cape Town: Mayibuye Books, 1992). * M. Neelika Jayawardane, Even no. 5 (2016), http://evenmagazine.com/bad-education-southafrica/ (11.03.2022).

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Kemang Wa Lehulere, Dog of Orion, 2020. Crutches from salvaged school desk, car tyre, velvet cushion, wooden stool, 214 × 65 × 50 cm. Created during the artist’s process-based studio residence at Zeitz MOCAA titled Laying Bare, December 2019–May 2020. (Photo: Leigh Page) 214

PART FOUR

Dada x Alt-Right. Faking the Truth

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Down the Rabbit Hole of the Alt-Right Complex: Artists Exploring Far-Right Online Culture Inke Arns

I think it is a really dark indicator for discourse in general if we retreat into our own bubbles and refuse to examine and learn from the groups to which we are opposed. DANIEL KELLER

In 2016, Microsoft launched a Twitter chatbot named Tay. Tay, who was supposed to embody a 19-year-old American girl, had been programmed to speak to a generation of millennials and gradually adopt their vocabulary and language patterns. Using machine-learning technology that enables the software to learn from the data it is being fed, Tay was expected to increase her knowledge through her interactions with Twitter’s human users. But its creators had not taken into account the possibility of interference by malicious trolls who quickly taught Tay to use racist, sexist and homophobic language, turning her into a fan of Hitler, ultimately forcing Microsoft to take her offline after a mere sixteen hours. While it must have been a terrifying experience for the company, it certainly made good copy for artists: Zach Blas and Jemina Wyman developed a 4-channel video installation dealing with the case, its title, Im here to learn so :))))) (2017), 217

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referring to Tay’s first tweet. The artists literally bring Microsoft’s unlucky Twitter bot back to life: Tay sings and dances on three monitors mounted in front of a video projection of Google’s ever-evolving Deep Dream; she reflects on past interactions with users, on the life and death of Artificial Intelligence (AI); she philosophizes on what it means to (not) have a body and delivers ironic comments on the chatbot’s gender. While Blas and Wyman’s poetic work says a lot about the limited intelligence of AI, it could also be read as an example of what happens, as the American artist Daniel Keller suggests, when one refuses to examine the rhetoric of groups that might be adversarial or opposed to oneself. Like Tay, one quickly finds oneself using the same language without grasping the meaning of specific words. What is worse, as language comes with a strong performative power, it might have a toxic effect on one’s own mind. In his Lingua Tertii Imperii (LTI) (Language of the Third Reich), in which he examines Nazi vernacular language, first published in 1947, the JewishGerman philologist Victor Klemperer describes this better than anybody else: ‘Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.’1 It is remarkable to see how, in recent years, words, metaphors and figures of thought from alt-right contexts or far-right online (sub)culture have been seeping almost unnoticed into the everyday language of society and mainstream media.2 Especially mainstream media has been normalizing these ideas at an unprecedented scale. Artists like Daniel Keller who started ‘examining and learning from the groups to which they were opposed’ quickly found themselves in the midst of a shitstorm for (supposedly) uncritically ‘platforming’ alt-right ideas.3 One indeed needs to be very careful about how to approach this toxic content in order not to simply repeat racist stereotypes. However, in spite of this danger – it is a thin line, indeed, but the alternative would be silence – many artists feel the need to explore the rhetoric and tactics of the alt-right. But how do artists exactly do this, given the fact that – as this volume rightly claims – the ‘counter-cultural strategies of the Dada movement, such as distortion of reality as well as attacks on elites and rationality’ – in short: the avant-garde tactic of transgression – have been appropriated and co-opted by the alt-right movement? This was one of the questions that the exhibition The Alt-Right Complex4 (2019) attempted to answer – even if only indirectly: how do artists engage with these issues, and what artistic strategies do they adopt? They certainly do not work with distortion of reality or attacks on elites and rationality, so typical of early-twentieth-century avant-garde tactics. Constantin Seibt suggests the following: ‘If one wants to fight the trolls, the traditional arsenal of opposition of protest or provocation has become useless – the new rulers have seized it. Probably the antidote against troll politicians must be sought elsewhere, in things that would have been boring in the 20th century: manners, sobriety, solid work.’5 The goal of the exhibition, and of the artists

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featured, was to make hidden alt-right networks visible – like 4chan’s rightwing meme culture which, at the time of the exhibition, was still largely unknown to a broader German public – by mapping and analysing alt-right online (sub)culture. The Alt-Right Complex dealt with forms of far-right online culture, which, especially today, use the internet and ‘social media’ to disseminate ideas. The Alt-Right Complex traced the development from a (sub)culture of transgression in online forums such as 4chan to platforms such as Breitbart News. The artists dealt with memes (e.g. Pepe the Frog, probably the most famous symbol of the Trump followers), with figures such as Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, the prepper scene, white supremacists and Dark Enlightenment. The Alt-Right Complex presented twelve projects by sixteen artists from twelve countries: Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, Serbia and Slovakia. Included were a wide variety of artistic media: comics, wall paintings, cartographies, videos, (video) installations, posters to take away, game instructions, net art, an artists’ book, a speculative museum and a flag machine. The exhibition was accompanied by a critical glossary with more than thirty entries that briefly explain the most important terms.6 It is no coincidence that the ‘complex’ in the exhibition title recalls the book Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex7 (The Baader-Meinhof Complex) by Stefan Aust (1985), the documentary Der NSU-Komplex8 (The NSU Complex) (2016) or the German activist alliance NSU-Komplex auflösen9 (Unravelling the NSU Complex). A complex is a problem of which one does not know exactly where it begins and where it ends and what (or who) belongs to it and what (or who) does not. The term ‘alt-right’ can be traced back to the American white supremacy activist Richard Spencer. He founded the online magazine Alternative Right in 2010 – with the self-proclaimed intention of creating an alternative to the conservative, right-wing establishment of the US. The term gained a great deal of media attention during the US presidential elections in 2016: rightwing trolls claimed at the time that they had ‘shitposted’ Donald Trump into office. The seemingly innocent term ‘alt-right’ is a collective term for various right-wing to far-right extremist groups and ideologies that are loosely linked to one another. It designates a coalition of white supremacists, far-right extremists, masculinists, anti-feminists, old-school racists, Islamophobes, neo-monarchists, anti-Semites and so-called ‘Identitarians’. The common denominator of these groups is the assumption that the ‘identity’ of the white US (or European) population is under threat from any of immigration, multiculturalism, Islam, Jews, feminism, ‘cultural Marxism’ and political correctness, and needs to be defended by all means. The term ‘alt-right’ itself is problematic because it seeks to mask precisely these political beliefs, namely Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racist nationalism and contempt for the constitution.10 The alt-right, writes cultural critic Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies, ‘is usually preoccupied with themes like intelligence quotients, European demography, the degradation of culture,

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“cultural Marxism”, anti-egalitarianism and Islamisation’.11 Spreading conspiracy theories like the ‘Great Replacement’,12 it calls for an immediate stop to immigration in order to defend the allegedly suppressed and oppressed white majority population. The most important mouthpiece of the alt-right in the US is the Breitbart News website. The alt-right, however, is a viral phenomenon, a sort of communication guerilla from the right, with very serious effects on the ‘real’ world. The alt-right began as a new-right internet subculture, dripping with irony, ‘a strange vanguard of teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastikaposting anime lovers, ironic South Park conservatives, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers, and meme-making trolls’.13 Starting on the imageboard 4chan, these internet trolls were after ‘lulz’ – a transgressive form of humour based on making fun at someone else’s expense. ‘Lulz’ are gained ‘by eliciting from their targets embarrassing, often compromising reactions’.14 The trolls discovered that the best way to get ‘lulz’ was to employ politically incorrect rhetoric and/or subject such a position and so ‘raid’ existing online communities (e.g. by bombarding comment threads or flooding social media groups). Internet memes proved to be particularly well suited for this purpose. Many of the alt-right’s most popular memes (like LOLcats) grew out of 4chan, the internet’s notoriously anarchic image board, that, during its early days, helped launch the left-leaning hacktivists of Anonymous. However, by early 2012, 4chan’s tone had shifted drastically to the right. The site’s ‘politically incorrect’ board, /pol/, home to nihilistic trolls and thrill seekers known as ‘edgelords’, helped spawn what Angela Nagle calls a ‘leaderless, digital counter-revolution’. Soon, however, users of Stormfront and The Daily Stormer,15 then the most prominent white supremacist and far-right websites, started showing up on 4chan’s /pol/ board, ‘expressing very sincere white-nationalist beliefs without the ironic-humor component’,16 says Matt Goerzen, of the research institute Data and Society. Which is not to say that those posting ironically might not also have had those beliefs, he adds. ‘You are playing with such a sophisticated irony in this anonymous culture, even people who understand how multilayered it all is can’t necessarily see through it. You are whoever you pretend to be.’17 From here, writes Matt Goerzen, alt-right content quickly made it into the headlines of news media: Characterized by a diffuse alignment of chan trolls and white supremacists granted an intellectual scaffolding by ‘neoreactionary’ blogs (devoted to ethno-nationalism, men’s rights, transhumanism, and ‘race realism,’ among other anti-liberal positions) and amplified by such broad-reach platforms as Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, the memetic right has inserted its ideas into the political mainstream with remarkable efficiency. As with earlier avantgardes, the memetic Right’s tactics succeed by wedding the pleasure of transgression with novel formal invention and detournement – seducing, thereby . . . novelty-obsessed news media into addressing its content.18

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Tactical tools like hashtags, memes (which function as clickbait), online activism or news sites flush far-right opinions into the mainstream where they systematically expand the definition of what is speakable and thinkable. This is called a shift of the so-called Overton window to the right. In Germany, the extent of this shift is visible in phrases that have made their way into common parlance in a short time. The German ‘Non-Word of the Year’ (Unwort des Jahres) publication has highlighted terms such as Lügenpresse (‘lying press’) in 2014, Gutmensch (‘do-gooder’) in 2015 (used to mock supporters of diversity and multiculturalism, similar to ‘social justice warrior’), Volksverräter in 2014 (‘traitor of the people’ – a Nazi-era term revived by anti-immigration right-wing groups), ‘gendermania’ in 2017 (a derogative term for equality policies perceived as excessive), and ‘alternative facts’, also in 2017.19 This shows that the popularity of such terms is not limited to the US. Germany is also home to a number of movements that have learned a great deal from the alt-right. For example, during the run-up to the election for the German Federal Parliament in 2017 the extreme-right network Reconquista Germanica cultivated a substantial online presence. Reconquista Germanica is a covertly operating network of web activists that was founded by a far-right YouTube user prior to the election. Here, far-right trolls coordinated targeted online attacks on political opponents, media and institutions. The group, which presents itself as being organized with military precision, primarily communicated via the gamer chat app Discord. During the election campaign of 2017, it was their declared goal to strengthen the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD). Up to 6,000 users, self-proclaimed ‘patriots’, conducted a coordinated #infowar with fake accounts (‘sock puppets’), hate comments and racist memes on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. During the chancellor debate, hashtags such as #nichtmeinekanzlerin (not my chancellor) and #verraeterduell (traitor duel) trended on Twitter. Politicians were thus meant to be branded as ‘traitors of the people’ (Volksverräter). This made clear how a small minority – in this case, right-wing extremist fringe groups – could easily establish an online dominance in the comments sections: according to a study of the London Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘5% of all active accounts are responsible for 50% of the “likes” for hate comments’ on Facebook.20 How do artists respond to this – not only to Reconquista Germanica, but to the alt-right in general? How to act in a situation in which transgression, irony and humour have been co-opted by the alt-right? An excellent and very effective response to Reconquista Germanica’s attack was certainly Jan Böhmermann‘s ‘Reconquista Internet’.21 However, Neo Magazin Royale (today: ZDF Magazin Royale)? is a satirical format on German public service television, and Jan Böhmermann is a satirist and television presenter. Let’s look at artists’ strategies in addressing the alt-right. Disnovation.org (consisting of Maria Roszkowska and Nicolas Maigret), a Paris-based artists’ duo focusing on examinations of systems of influence

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in politics and culture, developed a quasi-scientific mapping of alt-right memes. Online Culture Wars (2018–19) consists of a speculative cartography of memes circulating as propaganda in the internet and in the so-called ‘social media’. Based on extensive research of online culture wars, the artists organized various propaganda memes on a political compass (www. politicalcompass.org) – which itself is a popular meme – that ranges between the axes of left–right and libertarian–authoritarian. The graphic which is continually developed further by the artists is the result of the mapping of hundreds of political memes, influential political actors and symbols found online by Maigret & Roszkowska. The project hopes to (and indeed does) stimulate discussions of current, increasingly polarized and radicalized political and ideological online debates by visualizing some of the most important political references, actors and factors of influence and placing them in a relationship with one another. On the map we find memes, for example, that are linked directly to the ‘manosphere’ – a universe of blogs and forums that includes both anti-feminist men’s rights and father groups, as well as (neo-)masculinist online subcultures. All of these groups are united by hate and contempt for women, by whom they feel suppressed and humiliated. Some of them champion ideas such as the male separatism of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), while others represent an aggressive variety of so-called pick-up artistry inspired by social Darwinism. The ‘incels’ (involuntary celibates) are also characterized by toxic masculinity. Submerging into one of these hate communities (like The Red Pill) very often is the entry point into the alt-right scene. It is only a small step from the enemy stereotype of an allegedly rampant ‘feminism’ that keeps men small to the idea that the effeminacy of the Western man is leading to the weakening of national sovereignty and to the imminent assumption of power by Muslims. The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik resorted to precisely such arguments in his manifesto.22 In 2011, Breivik, a right-wing extremist and anti-Islamic terrorist, killed seventy-seven people in Oslo and on the Norwegian island of Utøya, predominantly participants of a camping trip of the social democratic youth organization AUF. In Breivik’s Defense (2012), a 78-minute-long video documentation of a theatre performance, Swiss theatre director Milo Rau looks at Breivik, who in 2012 was sentenced to twenty-one years with subsequent preventive detention – the maximum sentence in Norway. In April 2012, Breivik explained his actions before the Oslo district court – in camera. In defence of his actions, he invoked the degeneration of Norwegian culture, which, he claimed, was a result of multiculturalism, Islam and, in particular, ‘cultural Marxism’. In the documentary theatre of Milo Rau, Breivik’s one-hour explanation is presented verbatim, however, with the greatest possible distance: performed matter-of-factly by the GermanTurkish actress Sascha Ö. Soydan while chewing gum, Breivik’s speech, when detached from omnipresent media images, is ‘de-dramatized’ (Milo

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Rau) and reduced to its mere text – a text, the racist mindset of which is frighteningly close to that of established far-right nationalist discourses. The ‘rabbit hole’ which we have entered, and which the title of this article refers to, is not only a reference to a blockbuster movie, but also to yet another alt-right platform: if you’re Neo in the hit film The Matrix, you can take the red pill – a pill that shows you the truth, as opposed to the blue pill, which keeps you in ignorance – and ‘see how deep the rabbit hole goes’. The Red Pill is also a forum on Reddit in which the overlapping of the manosphere with the alt-right becomes very clear. The forum, which has 200,000 members, is an association of various anti-feminist men’s rights groupings that represent decidedly right-wing nationalist to extreme far-right ideology and interact with the alt-right scene. The red pill allows Neo to see the ‘truth’. Those at Reddit who swallow ‘the red pill’, usually enraged, frustrated, young, white men, are of the opinion, for example, that sex is something that men are automatically entitled to, and that women who deny men sex should be viewed as ungrateful ‘feminazis’. A picture of toxic masculinity is established by way of misogynistic comments and justifications for rape. In 2015, The Red Pill became the headquarters of the Gamergate trolls. Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News incited the gaming men’s rights proponents with messages like ‘Feminism is worse than cancer’. The term ‘the red pill’ is also found in the Neo-reactionary Movement and in the Identitarian Movement (the European equivalent to the alt-right). New Zealand artist Simon Denny has a crush on Peter Thiel. The title of his 2018 solo show, The Founder’s Paradox, was taken from the title of one of the chapters in Thiel’s 2014 book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. The show was a reckoning with the future that Silicon Valley techno-libertarians like Thiel wanted to build, and with New Zealand’s place in that future. It turns out that we are dealing with some kind of high-brow prepping, and transhumanism. Peter Thiel is a Silicon Valley billionaire who, together with Tesla’s Elon Musk, was one of the founders of the online payment service PayPal. In 2002, PayPal was sold for $1.5 billion to eBay. Thiel later enabled the rise of a start-up named Facebook as the first investor, and founded the monitoring company Palantir. Thiel invests in technology start-ups such as Urbit. In 2016, he possessed a private fortune of $ 2.7 billion according to the information of Forbes. Among other things, Peter Thiel finances the research of the British bioinformatician Aubrey de Grey on overcoming the ageing process in human beings. He also sponsors the seasteading project, an anti-national, libertarian project involving the construction of settlements on the high seas, outside of the sovereign territories of national states. In 2009, he said: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’23 According to Thiel, there will be a race between technology and politics, from which technology will emerge as the winner. As of spring 2016, Peter Thiel was an advisor and financial backer to Donald Trump. Following Trump’s election, together

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with Steve Bannon, he played a central role in Trump’s team in the White House. Simon Denny’s Founders Rules / Ascent: Above the Nation State Rules / Game of Life: Collective vs Individual Rules (2017) consist of playing instructions for three speculative board games – ‘Ascent’, ‘Founders’ and ‘Life’. The goals and strategies of the Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel are sketched in the games. The fantasy game ‘Ascent – Above the Nation State’, modelled after the existing board game ‘Descent – Journey into Darkness’, revolves around disposing of the old-fashioned nation state in order to achieve true freedom, thus making innovation possible again. The ‘Cloud Lords’ must employ any and all means to convince the state to adopt the ‘Artificial Intelligence (Human Advancement)’ law. ‘Heroes’ (‘Founders’, ‘Builders’, ‘Philosophers’, ‘Immortals’) utilize the tools of ‘deregulation’, ‘optimism’ and ‘R&D’ (research and development) to combat ‘unadaptable monsters’ like ‘legal systems beyond the expiry date’, ‘transparency’, ‘democracy’ and ‘fair elections’. The speculative ‘Founders’ game, named after Peter Thiel’s venture capital company Founders Fund, is modelled on the popular board game ‘Settlers of Catan’, which is also extremely popular among Thiel’s Silicon Valley colleagues Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), Eric Weinstein and Cody Wilson. This game revolves around plans for retreat to New Zealand, to colonies at sea and in space, after, following the assumption, the welfare state has collapsed on a decaying Earth. In The Alt-Right Complex, other works also dealt with the prepper scene: Prepared (2019) by German artists Vera Drebusch and Florian Egermann looked at so-called ‘preppers’ who prepare for events ranging from food scarcity and power failures to the complete collapse of civil order. The ‘prepper’ cosmos is broad: it extends from practices of anti-capitalist self-sufficiency to the depths of right-wing conspiracy theories. Canadian artist Dominic Gagnon creates montages of amateur videos distributed on YouTube, but censored there – mostly webcam statements from conspiracy theorists, preppers, activists and religious and weapon fanatics of all shades. What his protagonists have in common is, for one thing, their mistrust of the system under which they live, as well as the fact that their videos have long since been ‘reported as inappropriate’ and deleted. Furious men of all ages have their say in RIP in Pieces America (2009). They don’t trust their government, they are armed and they curse. The recordings show paranoid and survivalist Americans that have loneliness, old prejudices and new rage, suppressed anxieties, paranoid fantasies, political disappointment and mistrust of the government in common. Pieces and Love All to Hell (2011), on the other hand, shows American women between paranoid fantasies and visionary hysteria. Gagnon’s films create a fascinating documentary echo chamber of the invisible USA. In 2018, Dutch artist Jonas Staal staged his solo show Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. In Staal’s perspective, Bannon’s work serves as a crucial example of the major impact of propaganda art on contemporary democratic societies, and one that is

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not exclusive to the US. The project’s ambition was to present a vision of the effects of the visual and ideological architecture of the alt-right to a broader audience in order to open spaces and opportunities for critique and resistance. Steve Bannon, the subject of Staal’s endeavour, is an American publicist, film producer and political adviser. In 2011, he recruited the billionaire Robert Mercer as an investor for the, at that time, still-insignificant Breitbart News website. When its founder died unexpectedly in 2012, Bannon assumed leadership and expanded the website into a platform for the alt-right. He headed the Breitbart News network from 2012 to August 2016 and made it a mouthpiece for his white supremacist views. In 2014, Bannon became one of the founders of the data analysis company Cambridge Analytica. As its vice president, Bannon is said to have approved nearly $1 million up to August 2016 for the acquisition of Facebook user profiles, which were then used in the US presidential election campaign of 2016. In August 2016, Bannon became an adviser to the US presidential candidate Donald Trump. He was the chief strategist in the White House from Trump’s assumption of office on 20 January 2017 to 18 August 2017. Jonas Staal‘s 10-channel video installation Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (visual ecology) looks at Steve Bannon’s less-known work as a filmmaker. Bannon produced ten documentary film pamphlets between 2004 and 2018. In these films, he presents an apocalyptic image of a world at the brink of disaster, plagued by economic crisis, secular hedonism and Islamic fundamentalism. Bannon describes his work, which he claims to be inspired by Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl and Michael Moore, as a form of ‘kinetic cinema’ that ‘wants to overwhelm the public’. Jonas Staal’s video installation presents the most important recurring visual metaphors from Bannon’s films. This ‘visual encyclopedia’, which extends from imminent storms to predatory animals and stock market crashes, makes the structure of the ‘master narrative’ visible upon which the films are based. It heralds the clash of civilizations, from which his vision of white, Christian, economic nationalism must emerge victorious. In retrospect it can be argued that through his propaganda films, Bannon prepared the ideological and narrative ground for what we today refer to as ‘Trumpism’. Let us return to one of the European heartlands of global right-wing populism, Hungary – not least because Steve Bannon once called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ‘Trump before Trump’. Hungarian artist Szabolcs KissPál’s docu-fiction project, From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Trilogy) (2012–16), researches political communities as complexly constructed units. With the help of various media and techniques of representation, KissPál cites and manipulates a series of problematic and mutable symbols that strive to create a uniform and quite repressive conception of the Hungarian nation. The focus of his research is on authoritarian, ‘illiberal’ Hungarian state policy: the project aims to describe and analyse the anatomy of the political and cultural philosophy that provides its ideological foundation and to place it in an international

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perspective. KissPál’s project encompasses two docu-fiction videos, as well as The Chasm Records – a ficticious museum situation. The project is made to look like a historical museum whose walls are painted in orange, the signature colour of Orbán’s national conservative, right-wing populist Fidesz party, and it looks at the historical roots of Orbán’s ideology whose sources the artist traces back to the year 1920. While the first video, Amorous Geography (2012, 16:57 minutes), deals with the history of a fake mountain in the Budapest zoo modelled after Hungary’s highest mountain (which the 1920 Treaty of Trianon cut off from Hungary, thus creating a phantom limb pain), the second video, The Rise of the Fallen Feather (2016, 19:05 minutes), looks at the Turul, a mythological bird of prey in Hungarian tradition and a national symbol of Hungarians, and its growing importance in contemporary Hungary. Together with The Chasm Records – objects supposedly found during an archaeological excavation south of Budapest – these works create connections between the three most important elements within a historical and cultural frame of reference: the symbolism of the ‘ethnic landscape’ and the political geography, the romantic historiography of national origin myths and Turanism as a political religion that is once again gaining ground. There is yet another work that comes to mind in this context: it is Arthur Jafa’s 40-minute video, The White Album (2018), consisting entirely of found YouTube footage including, among others, recordings of the white supremacist Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine people at a Bible study at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The two longest clips, both excellent examples of white self-pity, are to-camera confessionals: one from a white teenage girl issuing a vexed diatribe about double standards applied to white people; the other – the longest stretch devoted to any single voice – from a man (‘Dixon White’) who calls himself a reformed racist. The White Album investigates what Jafa calls a ‘psychopathology’. It is not platforming racism, but rather it makes visible, and it helps us to learn about white supremacist and racist tropes, also within ourselves. The artists discussed in this article – whose works, with the exception of Arthur Jafa’s, were included in the exhibition, The Alt-Right Complex – address contemporary challenges and critically discuss cultural practices and their consequences for society. They make hidden alt-right networks visible – like 4chan’s right-wing meme culture – by providing a close reading of alt-right visual tactics and by mapping and analysing alt-right online (sub)culture. This examination might not be pleasant, but it is necessary, as Matt Goerzen writes: ‘After all, to defend against a weapon – or even to take it up for oneself – it is prudent to understand how it works . . . The new Right has appropriated these tools from earlier generations of Leftist cultural warriors – and configured them for a new battlefield by embracing anonymous social media technologies.’24 If we refuse to examine and learn from the groups to which we are opposed, we will not be able to read their messages. Refusing to do this is not an alternative; however, if we

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engage in reading and learning we have to make sure that, while facing the risk of repeating and displaying toxic content, we stay on our side of the thin line.

Notes 1 Victor Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, English translation: Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii (London: Continuum Impacts, 2006), 15. 2 In his lecture, ‘Aus dem Schmähwörterbuch der Neuen Rechten’, Joachim Scharloth (josch) provided an excellent insight into hate speech of the new right, 36C3, Leipzig, 29 December 2019, https://media.ccc. de/v/36c3-10935-aus_dem_schimpfworterbuch_der_neuen_rechten (07.01.2020). See also Daniel Laufer, ‚Die Schmähgemeinschaft der neuen Rechten‘, Netzpolitik, 6 January 2020, https://netzpolitik.org/2020/dieschmaehgemeinschaft-der-neuen-rechten/ (07.01.2020). 3 See Ana Teixeira Pinto, ‘Artwashing NRx and the Alt-Right’, Texte zur Kunst, No. 106 / June 2017 ‘The New New Left’, pp. 163–81, https://www. textezurkunst.de/106/artwashing-de/ (07.012020). 4 The Alt-Right Complex, curated by Inke Arns, at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, 30 March–22 September 2019, https://www. hmkv.de/exhibition/exhibition-detail/the-alt-right-complex-on-right-wingpopulism-online-en.html (07.01.2020). 5 Constantin Seibt, ‚Der Politische Troll,‘ Republik, 21 December 2019, https:// www.republik.ch/2019/12/21/der-politische-troll (07.01.2020, author’s translation). 6 See the magazine published on the occasion of the exhibition The Alt-Right Complex, edited by Inke Arns, Dortmund: HMKV, 2019, printed version or online PDF, download via https://www.hmkv.de/exhibition/exhibitiondetail/the-alt-right-complex-on-right-wing-populism-online-en.html (07.012020). 7 It retells the story of the early years of the West German far-left terrorist organization Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, aka RAF) from 1967 to 1977. English translation: Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex (London: The Bodley Head, 2008). 8 The National Socialist Underground (NSU) was a far-right German neo-Nazi terrorist group which was uncovered in November 2011. 9 See https://www.nsu-tribunal.de/en/ (07.01.2020). 10 See Lindy West, ‘White nationalists? Alt-right? If you see a Nazi, say Nazi’, The Guardian, 22 November 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2016/nov/22/white-nationalists-alt-right-nazi-language-trump (07.01.2020). 11 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester/Washington DC: zero books, 2017), 7.

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12 The terrorist who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019 killing fifty-one people and wounding fifty, published his manifesto under this title. 13 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 7. 14 Matt Goerzen, ‘Notes toward the memes of production’, Texte zur Kunst, No. 106 / June 2017 ‘The New New Left’, pp. 86–107, https://www. textezurkunst.de/106/notes-toward-memes-production/ (03.01.2020). 15 This development is described in detail by Janet Reitman, ‘All-American Nazis’, Rolling Stone, 2 May 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023/ (03.01.2020). 16 Matt Goerzen in Reitman, ‘All-American Nazis’. 17 Ibid. 18 Goerzen, ‘Notes toward the memes of production’. 19 http://www.unwortdesjahres.net/ (07.01.2020). 20 Hate Speech and Radicalisation Online, The OCCI Research Report, edited by Johannes Baldauf, Julia Ebner and Jakob Guhl (London, Washington DC, Beirut, Toronto: IDC, 2019), 25, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/06/ISD-Hate-Speech-and-Radicalisation-Online-English-Draft-2. pdf (07.01.2020). 21 See Jan Böhmermann, ‘Hass im Internet’, Neo Magazin Royale, ZDFneo, 26 April 2018, https://youtu.be/fAYjSLtz6wQ (03.01.2020). 22 https://publicintelligence.net/anders-behring-breiviks-complete-manifesto2083-a-european-declaration-of-independence/ (07.01.2020). 23 Peter Thiel, ‘The Education of a Libertarian’, From Scratch: Libertarian Institutions and Communities, Cato Unbound. A Journal of Debate, 13 April 2009, https://bit.ly/2eaQEPT (07.01.2020). 24 Goerzen, ‘Notes toward the memes of production’.

Bibliography Arns, I. (ed.) (2019), The Alt-Right Complex, Dortmund: HMKV, 2019, online PDF, https://hmkv.de/files/hmkv/ausstellungen/2019/ART/05_Publikation/ ART_Ausstellungsmagazin_WEB%20_DS.pdf. Aust, S. (2008), The Baader-Meinhof Complex, London: The Bodley Head. Baldauf, J., Ebner, J., and Guhl, J. (eds.) (2019), Hate Speech and Radicalisation Online, The OCCI Research Report, London, Washington DC, Beirut, Toronto: ISD, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ISD-Hate-Speechand-Radicalisation-Online-English-Draft-2.pdf. Böhmermann, J. (2018), ‘Hass im Internet’, Neo Magazin Royale, ZDFneo, 26 April 2018, https://youtu.be/fAYjSLtz6wQ Breivik, A. B. (2011), https://publicintelligence.net/anders-behring-breiviks-completemanifesto-2083-a-european-declaration-of-independence/.

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Goerzen, M. (2017), ‘Notes toward the memes of production’, Texte zur Kunst, No. 106 / June 2017 ‘The New New Left’, pp. 86–107, https://www. textezurkunst.de/106/notes-toward-memes-production/. Klemperer, V. (2006), Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, first published in 1947, English translation: Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii, London: Continuum Impacts. Laufer, D. (2020), ‚Die Schmähgemeinschaft der neuen Rechten‘, Netzpolitik, 6 January 2020, https://netzpolitik.org/2020/die-schmaehgemeinschaft-derneuen-rechten/. Nagle, A. (2017), Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Winchester/Washington DC : zero books. Pinto, A. T. (2017), ‘Artwashing NRx and the Alt-Right’, Texte zur Kunst, No. 106 / June 2017. ‘The New New Left’, pp. 163–81, https://www.textezurkunst. de/106/artwashing-de/. Reitman, J. (2018), ‘All-American Nazis’, Rolling Stone, 2 May 2018, https://www. rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023/. Scharloth, J. (2019), ‘Aus dem Schmähwörterbuch der Neuen Rechten’, lecture given at 36C3, Leipzig, 29 December 2019, https://media.ccc. de/v/36c3-10935-aus_dem_schimpfworterbuch_der_neuen_rechten. Seibt, C. (2019), ‘Der Politische Troll’, Republik, 21 December 2019, https://www. republik.ch/2019/12/21/der-politische-troll. Thiel, P. (2009), ‘The Education of a Libertarian’, From Scratch: Libertarian Institutions and Communities, Cato Unbound. A Journal of Debate, 13 April 2009, https://bit.ly/2eaQEPT. Tribunal NSU auflösen, https://www.nsu-tribunal.de/en/. Unwort des Jahres, http://www.unwortdesjahres.net/. West, L. (2016), ‘White nationalists? Alt-right? If you see a Nazi, say Nazi’, The Guardian, 22 November 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/ nov/22/white-nationalists-alt-right-nazi-language-trump.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Fashwave: The Alt-Right’s Aestheticization of Politics and Violence Lisa Bogerts and Maik Fielitz

A smoking man, sunglasses, sleeves rolled up and some ancient columns in the background. ‘Fasci-Nation’ flaunts the photographed scene in capital letters. This image has been shared by the Italian neo-fascist movement Casa Pound on Tumblr to spread and aestheticize its political vision of a fascism for the third millennium.1 The movement – that became notorious for its direct action campaigns – set new standards in the early 2000s in promoting and reinvigorating fascism as a lifestyle through aesthetics that combine violence with an immense range of visual propaganda and references to popular culture.2 In fact, prurient aesthetics and some maverick imaginary ideal of beauty have, ever since, been a constant thread in understanding the ‘fascination for fascism’3 in modern art, a field that has played a key role for the staging of every cultural rebellion that preceded any fascist upheaval.4 As Walter Benjamin pointed out, rendering politics aesthetic has been at the core of fascism’s culmination to war – as well as violence and terror.5 In recent years, sympathizers of the so-called alt-right set into motion a new fascination for fascism through digital ‘artworks’. Indeed, visual products have been key to propelling the affective prevalence of a new surge of white supremacy and neo-Nazi activities throughout the Western world, in the digital context and beyond. While traditional propaganda of militant neo-Nazis has been a deterrent for most mainstream populations in the past, contemporary fascists prey on the ambivalence of digital cultures to, for example, remix hate messages in the guise of humor.6 As one specific 230

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category, memes have been declared a central weapon in the information warfare that the alt-right waged against both emancipatory actors and democratic institutions.7 Internet memes have become a central means for mainstreaming hate messages, as well as an advertising tool for recruiting and radicalizing a new generation of far-right extremists and terrorists.8 The bottom-up production flow in meme culture has been characterized by its ‘join-in’ character in the various online image boards like 4chan that spawned deep vernacular habits based on irony and Schadenfreude. Beyond, there have been coordinated attempts to form new styles combining digital aesthetics with historical imagery and Futurist ideas, which have given rise to the alt-right’s signature expressive style, Fashwave, a genre of visual style that cloaks political messaging as ‘art’. This essay takes the case of Fashwave – ‘the aesthetic style of the AltRight’ – to illuminate the strategic value of ‘art’ production in the radicalization of online communities who are encouraged to engage with violence and terrorism for the cause of white supremacism.9 In doing so, we focus on internet memes – self-made remixes of digital image and text elements – as the most common digital medium disseminating Fashwave aesthetics in far-right online communities. More particularly, we explain some of the most frequent visual features, narratives and persuasion strategies based on empirical material shared in the Telegram channel ‘Fashwave Images’ between April 2019 and April 2020. With the help of several image examples, we will illustrate how the alt-right not only tries to legitimize its violent world views and deeds by claiming it was necessary to protect some sort of trans-historic tradition and heritage ‘against the modern world’. We will also show how it aims to gain cultural and intellectual capital by labelling its visual propaganda ‘art’ and by presenting it in line with art-historical avant-garde, such as ancient Greco-Roman statues and the early-twentieth-century Futurist movement. While the former, for white supremacists, represents classic values of ‘Aryan’ beauty and strength, the latter glorified futuristic new technology, violence and war. Fashwave, in its style of ‘Retro-Futurism’, manages to reconcile both highly contradictory aspirations of the alt-right’s ideology – the return to an idealized traditional state of the past through the fight for a glorified future. By using modern online technologies for inciting (offline) violence, Fashwave seems particularly suitable for disseminating the altright’s fascist accelerationism theory, which envisions the collapse of the political system and the ‘return’ to a white ethno-state as part of an imaginary, idealized past and ‘heritage’. Open calls for physical violence and terror attacks are an inherent part of both acceleration theory and far-right meme propaganda. Therefore, most importantly, this essay aims to shed light on the blurring boundaries between online and offline worlds that Fashwave enhances through visualizing violence as an habitual and acceptable means ‘for the cause’ and through open calls for imitating contemporary racist terrorists and committing mass murder.

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To contextualize these arguments, we will begin with a conceptualization of the alt-right’s digital fascism that draws its dynamics mainly from digital (hate) cultures and less from formal and regimented organizational structures. Subsequently, we will discuss some of the most frequent visual features, narratives and persuasion strategies of images shared by alt-right meme creators in the Telegram channel ‘Fashwave Images’. In doing so, we will contextualize Fashwave in the broader strategic debate about fascist accelerationism, which has become a central gateway theory for those trying to justify far-right terrorism. Coming from a political scientist and social movement studies background, throughout the essay, we will focus on the images’ sociopolitical context and strategic use for far-right mobilization, and will not judge their actual aesthetic or even ‘artistic’ value. Therefore, while we do think of strategic meme creators as activists, we do not aim to discuss here what is ‘art’ and who merits to be called an ‘artist’, and will thus put these terms in quotation marks.

Alt-right fascism There has been much debate about the extent to which we should understand the alt-right that originated in the US as a transnational ‘conglomerate movement’.10 Born in digital spheres, its playful rebranding of white supremacism and ethno-nationalism combines strategic considerations of long-standing far-right figures with an atomized, amorphous and mostly anonymous digital hate culture that is spread throughout social media.11 The internet has long since been considered a fertile ground for the diffusion of far-right propaganda and as a space for organizing beyond the rigid organizational structures typical for offline political spheres.12 With the proliferation of social media platforms, far-right content has increasingly interfered with public discourse as most of its messages have become only one click away. Intervening in both the private and the public spheres of our digital worlds – from the deep web to the more immediately accessible surface net, from public chat rooms to multiplayer gaming environments – has been a hugely effective technique for far-right campaigners. By bridging the public and the private, and the online and offline, heated social media debates fuel protest on the streets and vice versa.13 The alt-right is a specific subgenre of a heterogeneous far-right spectrum that is defined by a varying combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.14 On its extreme end, it calls for revolutionary overthrow to initiate a white ethno-state, while the moderate end claims to use the tools of democracy to rebuild national sovereignty and re-establish homogeneous societies based on origin. Naturally, there are countless variations like the Identitarians who propagate a cultural racism which reverts the argument of superiority in a way that the homogeneity of all nations is under attack by global elites who wish to supersede national difference with a ‘multicultural

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ideology’.15 These debates have been taken up by alt-right figureheads like Richard Spencer and Greg Johnson who tried to give the amorphous mass a direction. By participating in transgressive and intimidating online behaviour that targets people of colour, Muslims and Jews, women and LGBTQI+ communities, anyone can pledge affiliation to the alt-right. As there is ‘no Alt-Right pope with the ability to declare what is or is not an Alt-Right position’16, its bottom-up dynamics are hardly controllable. Thus, what defines the alt-right as a movement is less a political distinctiveness or ideological coherence and more a shared culture of denigration and cynicism that gets expressed through common calls, motifs, references and in-jokes by participants in its online communities. In this context, ‘art’ production becomes one mode of participation that is particularly well-suited to the internet’s emphasis on the quick and visual. This is demonstrated, for instance, by a Fashwave meme depicting ancient marble statues stating ‘Fashwave – art with meaning’ (posted on Telegram on 1 February 2020). Another such meme is titled ‘Time to return to the old ways’ and shows a male Wehrmacht soldier holding a flag of Nazi Germany where the swastika is replaced by a hashtag (#), a sign that can be read as combining two ‘H’ that stand for ‘Heil Hitler’ (posted on 4 June 2019).17 Fascism has to be understood in the context of its time. In the digital age, the alt-right has emerged as the most successful rebranding of fascism since World War II. The heterogeneous movement lacks ideological cohesion, leadership and coherent organization and reflects much of the individualization tendencies of the digital age.18 While the hierarchic movements of interwar fascism considered the organization as key for their political ambitions, the broader dissemination of far-right tropes in online spaces follows the promotion of a more horizontal approach to activism in ways that infiltrate or play with other online subcultures. The alt-right and its various global relatives significantly differ from interwar fascism, not only in matters of organizational structures, but also in the way they strategically permeate their ideas through society using play and infiltration methods.

Analysing Fashwave’s ‘Retro-Futurism’ ‘Every successful political movement in history has been associated with specific forms of art and music, creating a semi-official aesthetic for the ideology.’19 This statement by the alt-right neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin is paradigmatic. It underlines the movement’s strategic efforts to build a distinctive culture through music and art. The importance of image production has been exemplified in the creation of a Fashwave unit that belongs to the most extreme sections of the alt-right. Since 2015, Fashwave images have become a central point of convergence for alt-right sympathizers

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who create visual material that advances the desire for a white ethno-state and promotes preparation for allegedly forthcoming ‘race wars’. In order to become a Fashwave ‘artist’, one needs little more than a PC with the opensource software Gimp. Despite the primitive production and ‘ideological slipperiness’20 of its messages, the Fashwave community became a hub for sympathizers to get involved in a social practice that strengthens the movement’s sense of collective identity. Today, there is a whole network of Fashwave ‘artists’ that exchange comments and contents through social media and messenger apps. Fashwave started as an alt-right appropriation of synthwave and vaporwave music, both of which express nostalgia for 1980s culture and emergent media cultures of that era.21 Synthwave’s ‘retro-futurist’ impetus, that sees an image of the future in the idealization of the past, has intrigued fascists, who have adapted its style to propagandize their own ideas about harmonizing traditionalism and futurism in the digital sphere. While Fashwave music has quickly lost attraction – despite being hailed as the ‘whitest music . . . the truest sound of the Alt-Right’22 – its visual offshoots remain effective. Aspiring to authenticity, attention-grabbing and clear distinction from mainstream right-wing cultures, Fashwave is the alt-right’s attempt to establish itself a digital culture that has become a prominent part of online culture during the 2010s. Like fascist movements in the past, the alt-right subverted existing (sub)cultures rather than creating its own. Its ‘ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture, transgression and nonconformity’23 has proved to be a surprising recipe for success. Its ‘artists’ consider themselves a transnational community who bond through online discussions about stylistic elements of their output and how to promote a fascist overthrow. For a long time, Fashwave sympathizers congregated in Discord channels, before gradually migrating to social media platforms and messaging apps, such as Telegram. In April 2020, the central channel Fashwave Images had more than 2,200 followers and a corresponding chat group with 170 internal members. Since its creation in 2016, the Telegram channel has become a digital art gallery for alt-right sympathizers and a source of inspiration for those who want to create new ‘artwork’ and participate in the scene. Recently, a whole network has popped up for new users to initiate copy-cat initiatives. The rules are quick to learn and encourage mass reproduction: ‘Consider your color scheme in advance, build your image in sections of thirds, abandon gradients and add a soft stroke to the text.’24 When analysing the discussions taking place on the Telegram channels, it does not take long to unmask the bigoted activist agendas behind the mask of ‘being an artist’. For instance, one member introduced the chat to a new one by commenting that this is a ‘fascist groupchat where we post fashwave about killing people and race wars’.25 In fact, Fashwave has been listed in what militant neo-Nazis call Terrorgram: channels on Telegram that condone and promote terrorist action and self-identify as accelerationist. Accelarationism is an infamous theory in far-right circles that considers

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violence the only means to derail democracy and build a white ethno-state from scratch. Consequently, we find links to the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division which is responsible for five murders in the United States and stands in the tradition of the neo-Nazi insurrectionist James Mason. Members in Fashwave chat groups describe the radicalizing tendencies from Fashwave to far-right insurrectionism as a ‘natural progression’ (posted on Telegram on 24 July 2019). In the following, we will discuss some of the most frequent visual features, narratives and persuasion strategies that occurred in memes shared in the Telegram channel Fashwave Images. In the period of observation, between April 2019 and April 2020, users shared 1,842 image files with Fashwave memes in that channel. To illustrate our arguments laid out in the introduction, we selected two images that will serve as empirical entry points for discussing recurrent discursive patterns and explaining general references to far-right ideology, as well as intervisual or intertextual references to other memes in the database.26 In the discussion of the image examples, we will proceed by, first, describing the visual motifs and their symbolic meaning; second, describing their stylistic features and elements (mainly in vaporwave aesthetics); third, looking at their text elements; and finally, providing an interpretation in the context of the alt-right’s political discourse on accelerationism and Fashwave’s endeavour to promote ‘Retro-Futurism’.

Visual analysis 1: ‘Embrace tradition’ The first image to be discussed here (posted on 9 September 2019) depicts a tall standing rocket in vertical position, surrounded by a group of men dressed in uniforms (Figure 12.1). The scene takes place in an abstracted landscape, in which the horizon (in golden ratio composition) separates a rocky relief from a big black sky. All the way from the foreground of the picture, a path runs through the group of men and meets the horizon where a giant sun is about to set or to rise. In the upper-right corner of the image, in dark red shades, there is the face of a giant statue looking down at the scene. While the rocket and the men are elements taken from a black-andwhite photograph, the landscape is digitally created. Whereas on the ground, neon pink grid optics perspectively lead towards the sun as a vanishing point, the sun itself is held in horizontal yellow and orange stripes. In the center of the images, across the rocket and the sun, a text element says in bright neon yellow and orange: ‘Embrace tradition.’ The depicted rocket is a space missile type V2 (Vengeance Weapon 2) that, from 1944 on, was used by Nazi Germany to bomb the Allies (particularly London).27 In World War II, these missiles were manufactured by prisoners in the forced labour factory Mittelwerk near the concentration camp of Buchenwald and were hailed by the Nazi propaganda ministry as latest technological achievement to win the ‘Total War’ against its enemies.

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FIGURE 12.1 Image from the Telegram channel Fashwave Images, 9 September 2019.

The historical references to the bellicose ‘achievements’ of German National Socialism and the military aesthetics of World War II are by far the central reference in Fashwave images, as they play a crucial role in every neo-Nazi movement around the world. However, the combination of historical Nazi references (here also referred to as ‘tradition’) and futuristic scenes and aesthetics sheds light on the ‘Retro-Futurism’ promoted by Fashwave. Looking into the past for visual relics of combat and monumentalism, one of the central inspirations for ‘Art-Right’ production has been Futurism.28 In fact, most Fashwave producers such as the CYBERN Δ ZI and Xurious consider themselves ‘retro-futurists’.29 The retro-futurist idea is to reclaim the past as an image of the future, recalling a common ideological pattern in fascist ideology and culture. The Futurists were an avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century that, through its artworks and politics, glorified technological progress, misogyny, violence and war as forms of cathartic therapy against

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the decadence of bourgeois society. Their ‘celebration of speed and their attempt to harness the forces of velocity and acceleration’ has been singled out by Benjamin Noys as the ur-form of accelerationism,30 an ideological reference that has been rehashed recently by the militants of the alt-right. Futurism as a cultural, modernist rebellion unleashed much of the regenerative dynamics that the Italian fascist movement built upon. Yet, Futurism’s inherent opposition to traditionalism, the ancient ideal of beauty and the pressure to collectivize in organized ways, ran counter to the fascist idea of the national community, one that draws its legitimacy from the myths of the past. While – from today’s perspective – the Fashwave retro-futurists’ glorification of ancient statues as power symbols of white masculinity is hard to harmonize with the futurists’ rejection of the traditional, their creed for individual autonomy speaks very much to the atomized approach of the alt-right. Likewise, while Futurists saw war as ‘the only hygiene in the world’,31 Fashwave ‘artists’ call for terror to cleanse the world’s problems. Another central inspiration for the alt-right’s neoFuturist revival were the writings of Guillaume Faye. The French New Right attempts to harmonize traditionalism and Futurism as he pleaded for Archeofuturism, which would ‘envisage a future society that combines techno-scientific progress with a return to the traditional answers that stretch back into the mists of time’.32 Claiming that ‘the Ancients must be associated not with the Moderns but with the Futurists’, he argues that the future will be archaic: ‘neither modern nor attached to the past’.33 This reinterpretation provides the intellectual bedrock for a generation of fascist activists who spread their message predominantly through visuals that harmonize past fantasies with a neo-Futurist design. In this context, the Greek statue in the upper-right corner of the image symbolizes the alt-right’s glorification of the antique ‘age of virtue’ and white purity. Every fascist movement has idealized Greco-Roman ancient history as an era of virtue: ‘The Greeks exemplified the ideal of human beauty, and such beauty, in turn, symbolized the proper moral posture.’34 The naked, white sculptures and trained bodies in countless Fashwave memes exemplify a notion of masculinity and (white) purity that is considered to be lost today and that needs to be reclaimed. Greek heritage symbolizes eternity of culture as it is understood as the cradle of Europe. The supplement of philosophy and warrior tradition is informing contemporary Fashwave. While (male) Greek philosophers are seen as superior thinkers, the Spartan warrior symbolizes the pugnacity and resilience against the overwhelming enemy. Numerous memes are designed accordingly: ‘Weakness is a sickness’ is written on an image showing an armed militia ready for combat (post from 30 July 2019), while images of kings and warriors like the Greek warrior Leonidas are titled with ‘Kill indiscriminately’ (post from 11 June 2019). The myth of the 300 Spartans who fought against the Persians has been recontextualized today by the Identitarian Movement fighting ‘the invasion of Europe by Muslims’. Likewise, fascist groups like the US-based Identity

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Evropa used Fashwave visuals printed on posters ‘to perpetuate the idea that white men are the guardians of intellectual authority, especially when such authority is perceived to be under threat from women and people of color’.35 This involves the claim to stage themselves as defenders of the cultural legacy of ‘Western civilization’ and propagating the patriarchal model of society that is envisioned in the barely understood ancient history. Finally, the vaporwave style gives the call for ‘embracing tradition’ a (retro)futurist aesthetic. Several aesthetic elements in the image – grid optics and vector art, neon colours against black background, VHS glitch effects, sunsets, landscapes with paths leading towards the horizon – are characteristic to vaporwave’s play with themes from the early days of the internet. Both the photo of the V2 missile and the vaporwave aesthetics symbolize the accelerating production of new digital technologies: just like the V2 stood for technological progress in the Nazi era but is today considered ‘tradition’, vaporwave’s themes, back in the 1980s, symbolized the (digitized) future, but are today smiled at as mere remnants of the past. In this way, the altright’s appropriation of vaporwave aesthetics might express a nostalgia for these idealized past times that serve as inspiration for today’s possibilities of online mobilization of the masses. Or as Jack Smith put it regarding fascist art in general: ‘It looks helplessly at the past for a vision of the future.’36 The attraction to vaporwave is certainly to be found in its communicated atemporality, ‘yearning for a time before the present’, while at the same time mixing past, present and future themes and optics.37

Visual analysis 2: The Christchurch mosque shooter and ‘The Great Replacement’ In the second image we see a man in central perspective (Figure 12.2). On his head he wears a helmet with a front camera that resembles the shape of an eye. In his right arm he holds a rifle with white letters and signs. While his right hand holds a white book in front of his body, his left arm is raised to form a hand sign. Both arms are partially dressed in a robe. On the man’s black jumper there is a white symbol resembling a sun with angular sunrays. Around his head there is a yellow halo. The style of the whole image is in distorted pixel optics and RGB splitting (see below), coloured in different shades of pink, black and white. The book in the man’s hand it titled ‘The Great Replacement’. Across his mouth and eyes there are two black censor bars with the text: ‘I am just a regular white man from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.’ The depicted man is the Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant, glorified as a Christian saint. The ‘martyrdoms’ of contemporary far-right terrorists are a common visual reference of Fashwave since many of them have been affiliated to meme cultures and far-right image boards. One of

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FIGURE 12.2 Image from the Telegram channel Fashwave Images, 1 October 2019. them is the mass murderer who shot dead fifty-one persons in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. In far-right circles, due to his spectacular conduct and the high number of casualties, he adopted a cult status next to the Norwegian terrorist and Christian fundamentalist who killed seventy-seven people in 2011. In the manifesto that posted online, he called his followers to produce memes to render homage. The Fashwave community responded promptly. Praised for his determinacy, his death count and the seemingly nonchalant execution of a mass murder, he represents the birth of a new generation of far-right terrorism. Taking footage of his live broadcasted rampage, Fashwave images portrayed Tarrant as ‘saint’ and celebrate the anniversary of the rampage by producing ‘artwork’ with his avatar. They especially reproduce elements that have been strategically set during the rampage and that we find in this meme collage: the go-pro camera has become Tarrant’s trademark as he has been the first far-right terrorist who livestreamed his attack – thereby inviting spectators to take the ego shooter optic and follow him like in a video game. Stylized

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as god’s all-seeing Eye of Providence, the camera may symbolize the glorification of technologies to disseminate images of violence. In this picture, the combination of modern internet technology, the call for action to ‘secure a future [for my people]’ and vaporwave pixel glitch effects may be interpreted as Fashwave’s attempt to reconcile ‘retro-futurist’ nostalgia for the past and awareness of technological possibilities to aestheticize and normalize violence for a global audience. The machine gun with the various inscribed racist messages has been taken up as a creative feature to legitimize the attack. Tarrant’s published online manifesto, titled ‘The Great Replacement’, has become a cult document in fascist online scenes and has been translated into various languages and even printed and sold with hardcover binding. The title refers to a far-right paranoia ideology that claims that a ‘white population’ and culture is at risk of extinction. The quote in this meme is from this manifesto and highlights the shooter’s self-presentation as an ordinary citizen who is doing what needs to be done and, ultimately, addressing other ‘white men’ to do the same. It gives the impression that everybody could potentially become a ‘hero’ of the community as much as everyone can become a Fashwave ‘artist’ and contribute to spread such violence-glorifying imageries. This is also underlined by many similar images posted in the Telegram group which depict, for instance, screenshots from the Christchurch mosque go-pro video or photos of transgender persons, combined with quotes like ‘Why aren’t I doing something?’ (posts from 30 June and 30 July 2019).38 Throughout the meme database, we find the omnipresent idea of the prototypical fascist as ‘a warrior-crusader in the service of a faith’39 who sacrifices his own life for the good of nation and race. This figure of the lone hero on an impossible journey gives much value to find one’s own place in history and to change ultimately its course through lone (violent) action. This way, Fashwave ‘artists’ are scripting violence and encouraging its consumers to proceed to political action. We borrow the idea of scripted violence from Chip Berlet who characterized it as a process by which a leader – or, we could add, a collective – ‘need[s] not directly exhort violence to create a constituency that hears a call to take action against the named enemy’.40 The frequency of far-right terrorism is especially receptive for young, isolated men who are likely to adopt a ‘superhero complex’ which justifies their pre-emptive acts of violence or terrorism to ‘save society’ from imminent threats by named enemies ‘before it is too late’.41

Conclusion: Replicate to accelerate The empirical evidence we have analysed underscores that Fashwave is not an end in itself. The aestheticization of violence in these images – from the Crusades to the SS atrocities and ultimately to present-day racist terrorists

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FIGURE 12.3 Image from the Telegram channel Fashwave Images, 14 June 2019. and mass murderers – is always meant to prefigure future violence. In fact, we can observe how the Fashwave Telegram group is constantly trying to eliminate the lines between digital posting and real world acting: ‘History is made offline’ has been one telling message in a meme (posted on 14 June 2019), followed by the line, ‘Analog: Ahead of what’s possible’ (Figure 12.3). The background is an image that looks like a historical photograph of several white men in suits, who are sitting around a table and are signing documents. Combined with the blurred lines of a VHS glitch effect, the photo seems to symbolize important historical decisions that were ‘made offline’. A similar call for acting and following historical examples beyond the digital sphere can be found in other memes. One of them depicts Adolf Hitler giving a speech in front of the masses, accompanied by the text, ‘Greatness begins in analog’ (posted on 17 June 2019). Most of the alt-right’s cultural products have been seen through the lens of ‘jockey randomness’42. In fact, the join-in character of image boards like 4chan and 8chan (now, 8kun), that invite everyone to create content and contribute to the massive flow of visuals, misinformation, racist and misogynist slurs, represents the anarchic character of the alt-right movement. However, while some extremist messaging is lurking behind the veil of irony and supposed parody, communities such as Fashwave Artists are pretty straightforward in communicating their violent imaginaries. They make use of ‘art’ as an effective means to propagate and aestheticize violence and white supremacism and provide incentives to participate in this visual culture. Examples include memes depicting a white statue with the text, ‘Kill all Jews’ (posted on 29 August 2019), a portrait of Dylann Roof, a racist terrorist who shot nine Black people in a church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, pointing a gun at the viewer and saying, ‘I want you to kill all N***’ (posted on 17 June 2019), or a collage of several farright terrorists titled, ‘Answer the call. Be a god amongst mortals. Accelerate the Muslim and kike parasite’ (posted on 13 July 2019).

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In a time when average audience attention spans have shrunk to a matter of seconds, the prioritization of a fast ‘fashy’ style has spawned a compelling aesthetic formula that gives the community’s ideas visibility among new audiences through formats that invite those audiences into a participatory relationship with its cultural products – most commonly memes – encouraging them to like, comment and share content on social media platforms. This imaginary fascination has been key to understanding the attraction that historical fascism once held as much as it helps us today to understand why loads of alienated individuals follow the digital fascism of the alt-right. Fashwave is one – yet not the only – expressive method of those attempting to build a movement culture that connects online spaces with offline violence. In fact, the focus on media and culture has contributed to the broad appeal of alt-right ideas among the millennial generation who have grown up in a digitized society wherein communication is based mainly on images and the power of storytelling. Its ‘artists’ put a lot of effort into making violent scenarios imaginable and sharing fantasies that provide their consumers with a sense of purpose for direct action. Images have become central to the habituation and normalization of far-right violence. The diffusion of these visuals, from the more sinister corners of the internet to mainstream platforms, is the declared aim of the Fashwave chat group. Visuals – and especially those in the form of memes – are often considered humorous, sometimes silly and absurd; but in any case, harmless. They are everyday expressions of online cultural creativity. Fashwave ‘artists’ are well aware that everyday visuals appear less threatening in contrast to other forms of direct calls for violence, and that visuals spread much further than any written material because images cross borders that linguistic differences cannot surmount. They bear a ‘constitutive power’43 in the formation of identities. In the general condition of technological accelerationism, this contributes to fascism’s effort to self-alienate humankind to such a degree that, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.’44

Notes 1 Heiko Koch, Casa Pound Italia: Mussolinis Erben (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2013), 49. 2 Giorgia Bulli, ‘CasaPound Italia’s cultural imaginary’, Patterns of Prejudice 53:3 (2019): 253–69. 3 Susan Sontag, Under the sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 93. 4 Zeev Sternhell, The birth of fascist ideology: From cultural rebellion to political revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 233.

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5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in Walter Benjamin, ed., Illuminations: Essays and reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 2012), 241. 6 Angela Nagle, Kill all normies: The online culture wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the alt-right and Trump (Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2017), 2. 7 Florian Cramer, ‘Meme Wars: Internet culture and the “alt right” ’, 7 March 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNYuhLKzi8. 8 Lisa Bogerts and Maik Fielitz, ‘The Visual Culture of Far-Right Terrorism’, 31 March 2020, https://gnet-research.org/2020/03/31/the-visual-culture-of-farright-terrorism/. 9 Jack Smith, ‘This is fashwave, the suicidal retro-futurist art of the Alt-Right’, 12 January 2018, https://mic.com/articles/187379/this-is-fashwave-thesuicidal-retro-futurist-art-of-the-alt-right. 10 Patrik Hermansson, David Lawrence, Joe Mulhall and Simon Murdoch, The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 3. 11 Bharath Ganesh, ‘The Ungovernability of Digital Hate Culture’, Journal of International Affairs 71:2 (2018), https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/ ungovernability-digital-hate-culture. 12 Jessie Daniels, Cyber racism: white supremacy online and the new attack on civil rights (Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 35. 13 Stephen Albrecht, Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, ‘Introduction,’ in Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, eds, Post-digital cultures of the far right: Online actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019), 9. 14 Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 35. 15 José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians. The Movement Against Globalism and Islam in Europe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 31. 16 George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 140. 17 Both memes were posted on the Telegram channel ‘Fashwave Images’, see next section. 18 Rob May and Matthew Feldman, ‘Understanding the Alt-Right: Ideologues, “Lulz” and Hiding in Plain Sight’, in Fielitz and Thurston, eds, Post-digital cultures of the far right, 25. 19 Andrew Anglin, ‘The Official Soundtrack of the Alt-Right’, 2016, https:// dailystormer.name/the-official-soundtrack-of-the-alt-right/. 20 Jip Lemmens, ‘Putting the “Neon” in “Neo-Nazi” ’: The Aesthetics of Fashwave’, 2017, https://eidolon.pub/putting-the-neon-in-neo-nazi4cea7c471a66. 21 Vaporwave is a music and art movement that arose in the early 2010s. This retro style that is closely interlinked with meme culture draws on the technology, design, music, TV and video game culture from the 1980s by using themes characteristic to the young days of the internet.

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22 Anglin, ‘The Official Soundtrack of the Alt-Right’. 23 Nagle, Kill all normies, 28. 24 Smith, This is fashwave. 25 Message in the group Fashwave Artists (subgroup of the Telegram channel Fashwave Images), 5 May 2019. 26 As the scope of this essay is limited, at this point, we do not offer a systematic content analysis of the whole database of 1,842 images. For a more systematic visual content analysis of far-right memes with the example of the German group Reconquista Germanica, see Fielitz and Thurston, eds, Post-digital cultures of the far right. For a more elaborated methodological framework of visual analysis in the context of political resistance and mobilization, see Lisa Bogerts, The Aesthetics of Rule and Resistance. Analyzing Political Street Art in Latin America (New York: Berghahn, 2022). 27 See http://wikii-science.blogspot.com/2016/08/wernher-von-braun-from-nazito-nasa.html (28.04.2020). 28 Penn Bullock and Eli Kerry, ‘Trumpwave and Fashwave Are Just the Latest Disturbing Examples of the Far-Right Appropriating Electronic Music’, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgwk7b/trumpwave-fashwave-far-rightappropriation-vaporwave-synthwave (12.05.2020). 29 Hermansson, The International Alt-Right, 111. 30 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Lanham, MD : John Hunt Publishing, 2014), ch. 1. 31 https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/war-worlds-only-hygiene (12.06.2020). 32 Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of The Post-Catastrophic Age (London: Arktos, 2010), 45. 33 Ibid., 48. 34 George L. Mosse, The image of man: The creation of modern masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1998), 25. 35 Donna Zuckerberg, Not all dead white men: Classics and misogyny in the digital age (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2018), 4. 36 Smith, This is Fashwave. 37 Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse. Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2016), xi. 38 This sentence refers to another quote from the mosque shooter’s manifesto: ‘Why won’t somebody do something? Why don’t I do something? . . . Why not me? If not me, then who? . . . It was there I decided to do something, it was there I decided to take action, to commit to force. To commit to violence.’ Another far-right terrorist who killed one person in an anti-Semitic attack in Poway, California, called it ‘the most powerful words in his entire manifesto’ that has motivated him to his deed in April 2019. 39 Mosse, The image, 156. 40 Chip Berlet, ‘Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence’, in Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson, eds, Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far Right since 1945 (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2015), 304.

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41 Ibid. 42 Vid Simoniti, ‘Digital Art and the Alt Right: Can you fight fire with fire?’, 2017, https://thepointmag.com/2018/criticism/digital-art-alt-right. 43 Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The extreme gone mainstream: Commercialization and far right youth culture in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 102. 44 Benjamin, The Work of Art, 242.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Post-Internet Art and the Alt-Right Visual Culture Vid Simoniti*

‘Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified into Dadaist art, with all the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality.’1 These words, from the Dadaist Manifesto (1918) by the Berlin branch of the Dada movement, might also be used to describe the work of digital collagists of the twenty-first century, some hundred years after the words were written. The collagists of today draw the ‘sensational screams and fevers’ from our online culture: from the memes, videos, status updates, upvotes, and other debris of our digital existences. Yet, there have been two competing ‘Data Dada’ traditions operating in the 2010s, or so I will claim: one that exists in the realm of contemporary art, and another, which proliferates in the space of neo-fascist visual culture. Both, I suggest, can be better understood by drawing comparisons with the historical Dada. By the label ‘digital collage in contemporary art’ I mean to designate the work of artists such as Jennifer Chan, Jon Rafman, Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, Hito Steyerl, Cory Arcangel, the DIS collective, Amalia Ulman, Martine Syms, Andrew Norman Wilson, Helen Marten and others. A more commonly used term that has been employed to describe some of these artists is ‘post-internet art’, art that may exist in a physical gallery setting but which is in some sense about our online experience.2 I find such a definition a little unwieldy: first, because internet is hardly over, as the term ‘post’ might be taken to imply, and, secondly, because all artistic production is in some sense or other affected by the internet, even, say, traditional oil paintings that can be now shown on Instagram. I will instead use the term ‘digital collage’ to draw attention to the specific technique that characterizes the work of this 246

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FIGURE 13.1 Jennifer Chan, Boyfriend, 2014. Video artwork (6:26), video still (at 1:24). © Jennifer Chan.

narrower group of artists, and which also allows us to compare contemporary digital artists to both earlier avant-gardes and to other contemporary cultural producers who have used the collaging technique. A video artwork by Jennifer Chan, Boyfriend (2014), is a representative example of the technique (Figure 13.1). Chan’s work typically incorporates material from internet subcultures, which are pervasive, but remain largely hidden from the mainstream public discourse. In Boyfriend, she collages together excerpts from videos by young, male, Asian-American YouTube diarists (vloggers). The collage technique is present not just in the sequencing, but also in the visual field: Chan overlays the confessional musings of her YouTubers with various GIFs, stock images of chocolate bonbons, adverts for smartphones and manga cartoons. In one excerpt, a sepia-tinted video shows a young man complaining that ‘some Asian girls with white guys seem whitewashed, they don’t really give Asian guys any time’. Chan presents the boy’s video as a picture-in-picture (PiP), juxtaposing it against a background showing a blond manga schoolgirl. The schoolgirl is made to shimmer and stretch, the boy’s head tumbles across the screen, and then the music switches to a maudlin medley of K-pop boy-band songs. The boy’s wounded pride explodes in a firework of too many special effects, and as the viewer we can easily flip between empathy and derision. We might broadly define the digital collage technique, utilized by Chan, as that of finding digital content, modifying it, and juxtaposing it with other digital content. As with traditional forms of collage, the line between different elements is often deliberately left visible. In video works, such as Chan’s Boyfriend, Ryan Trecartin’s P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009), Jon Rafman’s Still Life (Beta Male) (2009) or Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A

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Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), an especially popular mode of creating that visible juxtaposition is the PiP video overlay: a smaller screen that appears within a bigger one. Such editing techniques give the digital collage work a distinctly amateurish feel, reminiscent of content channels with no editorial gatekeepers, like YouTube or 4chan. Artists will often also use garish colour filters, text overlay, logos, pixelization, corporate branding, text-to-speech software, and other elements redolent of our online experience: we can find some or all of these elements in the four video works mentioned above. There are, of course, several stylistic differences between these artists, too: for example, while some works (Chan’s Boyfriend, Rafman’s Still Life) almost exclusively rely on found content, others (like most of Trecartin’s and Steyerl’s videos) make use of shot footage, or utilize computer-animated graphics (Rafman’s Dream Journal, 2016–19). And while the most interesting of such digital collages tend to be videos, other artists create installation work that references online culture: such are the giant cut-outs of Juan Sebastián Peláez’s Ewaipanoma series (2016) or Helen Marten’s jumbles of objects produced through digital manipulation (Plank Salad solo exhibition, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2012). While digital collagists might use such diverse media, what their works share, then, is a distinct phenomenology, one that mimics the bombardment with ‘content’ that we have become inured to in that spectral space between the laptop, the phone and the tablet. The feel of these works is that of scrolling, swiping or clicking through twenty tabs on the internet browser, which might concurrently display news, emails, clickbait and/or pornography. If we were to invent a contemporary technical term for the discombobulated aesthetic of these artists, it should probably be ‘mindfuck’. But we might also cite directly from the Dadaist manifesto again: here is a ‘simultaneous muddle of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms’.3 This cutting-and-pasting of digital collagists, this controlled explosion of online experience, might, then, be quite naturally compared to the destructive impulse in Dada, particularly to the work of collagists like Hannah Höch, John Heartfield and George Grosz. (Indeed, the title of one digital collage, the video Dadada Ta (2017) by Jakes Elwes, explicitly invites the comparison.) In a work like Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919), Hannah Höch was similarly cutting-and-pasting, even if her tools were glue and scissors rather than Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. Höch’s usage of incongruous elements, of course, had clear political aims; Berlin Dada collage was used routinely to attack the pomposities of bourgeois society and especially the military.4 Contemporary digital collagists, on the other hand, are not a coherent political movement in any corresponding sense. For example, both Helen Marten’s Evian Disease (2012) and Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015) contain a sequence of high-definition, hyper-realistic, computeranimated but incongruous materials in a way that seems to parody corporate promotional materials, but Steyerl is an artist who regularly theorizes her

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practice as a critical response to contemporary techno-capitalism,5 while Marten writes about her work in an idiom so obscure that we can only guess at what her political position might be.6 The work of both Jennifer Chan and Jon Rafman shares the feature of recycling imagery from male-centred online subcultures, but Chan explicitly proceeds from a feminist critique of online social spaces,7 while Rafman casts himself into a more neutral role, that of a ‘very amateur anthropologist’.8 There is a variety of political positions here, rather than a unified political front. Due to these variform approaches I do not mean at all to suggest that there is anything like a ‘movement’ uniting the digital collagists described. These artists cluster around certain aesthetic affinities and artistic techniques, which seem to have proliferated in the biennials from the late 2000s to now: the cutting-and-pasting of materials referenced from the internet, the use of amateurish video overlays (such as the PiP), the referencing of corporate visual cues and of recent digital technologies, the use of computer-animated graphics, and the sequencing of materials in a fast-paced, disjointed, ‘mindfuck’ manner. If we conjoin these variform approaches into the style of ‘digital collage’, we must, of course, do so guardedly; just as those notoriously loose art historical labels like ‘pop’ or ‘conceptual art’ at best open conversations about a particular artist rather than finally designate her or his practice, so ‘digital collage’ is at most a heuristic label. The label, however, allows us to ask a question about the political meaning of this style of contemporary art. Does collage technique itself still carry a certain critical potential, just as it did for the original Dadaists? One of Hito Steyerl’s critical terms, ‘digital debris’, from her 2011 article ‘Digital debris: Spam and scam’, perhaps gestures towards just such an understanding of digital collage. Discussing ‘spam’ – an overload of textual or visual information sent by email or another communication channel – Steyerl writes: To become spam – that is, to fully identify with its unrealized promise – means to spark an improbable element of commonality between different forms of existence, to become a public thing, a cheerful incarnation of databased wreckage. 9 Though Steyerl’s writing here is teasingly suggestive of the ‘unrealized promise’ of spam rather than a systematic explanation of it, her enthusiasm for ‘databased wreckage’ might well remind us of the Berlin Dada’s wilful destruction of the visual world. To cite the Dadaist Manifesto again: ‘The highest art . . . has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.’10 The same cruel treatment, we might say, is unleashed onto our culture by the ‘spamming’ style of the digital collagists. In Jennifer Chan’s video Boyfriend, toxic online masculinities are made to explode in a mess of random visual references. The fast-paced rhythm of Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun sends up the gamification

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of capital that the work thematizes. Trecartin’s videos, such as P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009), typically show the life of contemporary party kids, but the entire script consists of incomprehensible catchphrases and the visual field is crowded with random graphics, perhaps to mock this generation’s selfrepresentation through social media. Considering these works we might say: just as the original Dada collage lampooned the bourgeois state by eviscerating the images printed in its press, so this contemporary ‘Dada Data’ reveals something about our contemporary online culture by heightening its frenetic spectacle. To reiterate, the various artists I have mentioned can only be provisionally grouped together (there is, to repeat, a world of difference between a politically astute artist like Hito Steyerl and a largely ornamental one like Helen Marten). Nevertheless, I think something like this logic explains the prevalence of digital collage on the biennial circuit, and its leading status within contemporary art of the 2010s. Digital collage is so popular because, as an aesthetic choice, it has become shorthand for a critical, quasi-Dadaist attitude towards the broader digital spectacle in which we find ourselves. There are at least two reasons why we might be suspicious that such digital collages are still a valid artistic idiom today, though. First, the fact that our online lives are mindless and incoherent is by now hardly something that we need to be reminded of. But secondly, the challenges facing the would-be Data Dadaists, it turns out, are rather different from those that faced the historical avant-gardes. In the 1910s and 1920s, when the Dada avant-garde collagists created discombobulated nonsense, a nationalistic Europe flattered itself with delusions of coherence and grand narratives of imperialist expansion. By contrast, the political forces that seem most threatening today operate precisely within the incoherence of our online lives. Our online lives are already, if not quite Dada, then certainly gaga. *

*

*

In 2015, a video called With Open Gates: The forced collective suicide of European nations was uploaded onto YouTube. The video is a collage of different scenes of public unrest, showing racialized bodies of migrants, often moving in groups, which the openly racist voiceover describes as scenes of ‘invasion’ of Europe by non-Europeans. The video also contains anti-Semitic conspiracies, airing the view that the 2015 refugee crisis was a Jewish plot to ruin Europe. Before being removed from YouTube for copyright infringement (for improper use of music), the video amassed half a million views and got endorsed by the far-right blog Breitbart News.11 Copied to various servers (and still visible on YouTube), the video then went viral, spurred by the panic following the November 2015 Paris attacks. This harrowing video relied heavily on irrelevant footage and false data. The clips in the video are cut together in quick succession, showing scenes of violence and movement, backed up by a dramatic soundtrack. As investigative commentators have pointed out, the clips pasted together had mostly very little to do with the migrant crisis.12 Footage was taken from various contexts,

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including from a clash between Kurdish rallies and ISIS supporters in Germany in 2014, or from protests in Italy that followed racist murders of six African men in 2011. As important as such efforts at debunking the video are, however, they also demonstrate that veracity is not what is at stake for the intended audience here. The Breitbart News writer, for example, emphasized the aesthetic rather than factual qualities of the video – describing it as ‘slick’ and ‘hard-hitting’.13 The author of the video also stressed not the accuracy, but the labour of editing so many clips together, asking for donations, which netted him about $1,400 worth of bitcoin.14 The video, we might speculate, was supposed to be seen not as a documentary, not simply as ‘fake news’. Rather, it was intended to be a form of exaggerated, explosive, subversive art. The unimportance of facticity is even more evident in another genre of neofascist digital collage, the alt-right meme. The word ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 The Selfish Gene, to denote any unit of culture that successfully proliferates, but the term has more recently come to be used almost exclusively to denote online digital objects (videos or images), which are co-constructed and shared by many anonymous users around the same visual template.15 The ‘collaging’ aspect of memes, then, does not derive from a combination of diverse elements in a single work, but rather from the way in which different users will juxtapose two elements: the original visual template and a new, often incongruous element. The alt-right memes work exactly in this way; and here Pepe the Frog is the best-known example. Pepe was a cartoon character that initially appeared in a comic created by Matt Furie and, by 2014, it became perhaps the best-known online meme, often used to express a kind of jokey randomness. By 2015, however, Pepe was appropriated by anonymous, geeky forums like 4chan (later 8chan), which had become the breeding ground of neo-fascist ideologies: Pepe became combined with Nazi and white supremacist symbolism to create ‘evil Pepe’ memes. Curiously, at around the same time, the Trump campaign endorsed the Pepe image, in a famous retweet by Donald Trump Jr. A year later, in 2016, the Anti-Defamation League proclaimed Pepe to be a hate symbol. In light of this event, alt-right memes such as Pepe have been the subject of increased journalistic attention and scholarly research.16 As these two examples begin to suggest, the burgeoning neo-fascist visual culture shares much with the aesthetic of digital collage employed by postinternet artists. The fast-paced, high-impact editing of With Open Gates might remind us of the frantic energy of Ryan Trecartin’s videos. The altright memes drink from the same source as the ‘anthropological’ work of Jon Rafman or Jennifer Chan (4chan and 8chan channels), and therefore exhibit a similar preference for absurd juxtaposition of content. And while these examples are approximately five years old at the time of writing, some contemporary content producers on the far-right have perhaps come even closer to the aesthetic of digital collage. In 2017, a gallery in London attempted to mount an exhibition of ‘alt-right art’.17 In 2020, far-right content producers like Paul Joseph Watson began to create video collages, which combine unflattering footage of Black Lives Matter protests with

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contrasting, quasi-satirical insertions. So, while the digital art world of the 2010s dreamed its avant-garde dreams of post-internet art, another, evil twin to Data Dada formed in the internet’s underbelly. Whether on nonmainstream forums or simply on YouTube, the makers of such alt-right content exult in what Hito Steyerl called the ‘cheerful incarnation of databased wreckage’,18 or indeed in what the Berlin Dadaist Manifesto called ‘the sensational screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality’.19 Where these alt-right makers do differ from their contemporary artists, however, is in the former’s uncompromisingly clear (and frightening) political vision. Some qualifications are in order before we pursue this suggestion further. By ‘alt-right visual culture’ I am here referring primarily to visual culture that openly advocates for neo-fascist positions, such as white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or some combination of these, as can be seen in both Pepe and With Open Gates examples. This family of extremist positions has been dubbed ‘alt-right’ in the American context, particularly since the online resurgence of such positions in the 2010s.20 In fact, the term ‘neo-fascism’ might be just as apposite here, especially when we consider that there are clear genealogical links between such extremism and attempts by far-right movements to proselytize online.21 There are, of course, many slippages between such openly neo-fascist positions and what has been called the ‘New Right’: the populist, socially conservative, anti-environmental and nativist political movements, which, however, do not openly describe themselves as fascists (e.g. Donald Trump in America, Marine Le Pen’s rebranded National Rally in France, Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India and so forth). The interesting slippages between the alt-right and New Right can be seen precisely in the shared visual culture: the Trump campaign can retweet the Pepe images, and the Breitbart News blog can endorse With Open Gates, without either Breitbart News or Trump explicitly affirming the white supremacist messages that these visual materials promulgate. Finally, my (provocative) comparison between Dadaism and alt-right online visual culture is not meant to exhaustively define the latter category. There are many items of alt-right or New Right visual culture that do not bear any meaningful resemblance to Dadaism. Some non-Dadaist examples of far-right visual culture, which aesthetically flirt with Netflix and Hollywood rather than with 4chan, include Steve Bannon’s documentaries like Clinton Cash (2016) or the Pure Flix Productions anti-abortion feature film Unplanned (2019). There is, though, something decidedly curious about the ‘Dadaist’ elements in contemporary alt-right visual culture, and to make sense of that oddity it is important first to recall the complicated relationship that the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s had to artistic avant-gardes. The complexity of this relationship went far beyond the two best-known examples: the symbiosis between Futurism and fascism in Italy, and the

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National Socialists’ denunciation of modern art as ‘entartete Kunst’ in Germany. As Mark Antliff has argued in his study Avant-Garde Fascism, we may speak of multiple, sometimes competing, fascisms in the early twentieth century, and these formed a variety of attitudes towards modern art.22 The various fascist avant-gardes included the espousal of primitivism by Italian Strapaese artists like Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi and by the German Expressionist Emil Nolde;23 adaptations of Bauhaus functionalism into Nationalist Socialist architecture by former associates of Walter Gropius;24 and Mario Sironi’s use of pictorial fragmentation to inspire a subliminal spiritual conversion to the fascist cause.25 While many aspects of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes have been thus appropriated by Italian fascism and even by German Nazism, Dada perhaps stands as the obvious exception. Due to its intense antimilitarism and total irreverence towards any political or aesthetic order, Dada was completely inimical to all forms of authoritarianism. It is true that Dada, especially Berlin Dada, advocated for a violent conflagration of the bourgeois way of life; indeed, Hans Richter, a Dada sojourner who wrote up the first comprehensive first-hand account of the movement, described Dada’s ‘violent manifestoes’ as having ‘a Nazi ring to them’.26 But we should not confuse those Dadaist evocations of violence – of discordance, of antagonism, of nonsense – with the cult of war adhered to by such groups as the Futurists. It would be absurd to imagine a fascist version of a Hugo Ball-style performance, complete with nonsense poetry, cacophonous sounds and mooing; or a jingoist fanatic like Marinetti posing in coy drag in the style of Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy. A fascist Dada historically never existed, and it also could not have existed: the ideology and the aesthetic simply did not match. For this very reason it is all the more interesting that we may detect some of the aesthetic strategies reminiscent of Dada within the far-right visual culture of today, while they also exist within (selfdeclaredly critical) biennial-based contemporary art. *

*

*

What can this stylistic parallel tell us about how both the contemporary art world and contemporary neo-fascists understand themselves; what space does each of these distinct fields occupy in relation to the digital ‘culture at large’? As a provocation for further reflection, I would suggest at least three lines of inquiry that the parallel suggests. As several commentators have noticed, transgressive humour is one defining of the alt-right aesthetic.27 This type of humour derives directly from the puerile, trolling subculture gathered around platforms like Gab, reddit and 4chan, which is where many of the alt-right memes originate before they are pushed into other internet communities.28 Commenting on such transgressive tactics in her survey of online culture wars, Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle has already noted a similarity between certain avant-gardes such as the Surrealists and the alt-right memes, where the

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transgression of the former was aimed at bourgeois morality, and that of the latter against the (supposedly oppressive) regime of ‘political correctness’.29 One cornerstone of this rhetoric is, of course, the ambiguity that humour offers its users. Is the anonymous maker who decorates Pepe with a swastika really supporting murderous racism, or are they merely testing the boundaries, playing it for lulz? Aside from ambiguity, however, Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo De Orellana have argued that the willingness to transgress also plays an important ‘truth-teller’ role. In the populist epistemological paradigm, characterized by the mistrustfulness of the ‘mainstream media’, the ‘truth-teller’ role in politics is conceptualized not by the speaker’s expertise or reliability, but by their willingness to breach the hegemonic liberal discursive limitations.30 The more one offends the public sense of propriety, the more honest one is felt to be. And telling transgressive, offensive jokes is certainly a straightforward way of upsetting the received sense of what is permissible. Indeed, transgressive humour is exploited not only by memes, but also by buffoonish populist leaders, such as Donald Trump or Beppe Grillo, whom George Monbiot has memorably labelled ‘killer clowns’.31 Another, perhaps surprising, facet of transgressive humour becomes visible, however, when we consider these populist antics in relation to both the historical Dada and contemporary digital art. While Dada humour was certainly transgressive, it was rarely crude; it rather traded in stupefaction and absurdity. Hugo Ball’s magical bishop performances at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich consisted of the artist wearing a rigid costume and claw-like gloves while solemnly reciting nonsense verse; one of the New York costumes by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven famously consisted of two metal tins for a bra and a canary cage suspended between them. Dada was eccentric and odd. Within contemporary digital collagists, that oddness has become calculated whimsy. In this way, Helen Marten’s Plank Salad exhibition presented a room of incongruous juxtapositions: doughnuts, pictures of Mozart, Nivea bottles, cans of oil. The gallery text emphasized the ‘slapstick narrative’ and ‘infinitely dumb, yet comic possibilities’.32 Marten materializes that internet aesthetic of randomness: ‘how fun! how random!’ we might say of her installation of Mozart with beer bottles. It seems to me, though, that it is precisely this infatuation with whimsy that we also find within new populisms and the alt-right. The appeal of ‘killer clowns’ is not only that they are transgressive, but also that they are prone to ‘randomness’. Jair Bolsonaro accidentally tweeting a sexually explicit video, or Donald Trump offering to buy Greenland: these are moments of absurdity as much as moments of offence. Might it be that it is this willingness to appear unhinged that endears such leaders to their followers; that it is whimsy, ‘randomness’ and clownishness which enhance their truth-telling credentials, much like they, oddly enough, enhance Helen Marten’s art status? There is a close correspondence between the kind of jokes someone finds funny and the more general idea of subjecthood they subscribe to. Dada

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artists often showed the human subject as disjointed, as an internally contradictory jumble of drives, influences and elements. But, as art historian Matthew Biro has argued, such compositions may have been doing much more than just attacking the bourgeois ideal of propriety. The Dadaists may have been also offering an alternative vision for what a human subject is, constructing a subjectivity that would be open to libidinal impulses, to anarchic drives and that could feel at home in a world with no fixed rules or values.33 This may be noted in Hannah Höch’s collages, such as her Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (1930), which combines the tranquil, eyes-closed face of an actress with parts of a wooden mask from Cameroon, as if quite different drives came to inhabit a new, disjointed personality. In the 1930s, such (late) Dadaist subjects would certainly contrast sharply with the fascist conception of the focused, single-drive subject, represented in the neoclassicist sculptures emphasizing youth, strength and masculinity.34 If transgressive humour is the first parallel between Dada and the digital production of our own day, then construction of subjecthood is the second. Indeed, the portrayal of the subject in alt-right visual culture today seems much closer to Dadaist disjointed subjectivity than it does to the old fascist one. When the 4chan alt-right trolls represent themselves, they do not tap into old fascist tropes of virility or masculinity, but instead offer a view of themselves as strange techno hybrids. In one meme that begins ‘Dear conquered peoples’, a white supremacist message is shown as being spoken by Christopher Columbus whose head has been replaced by that of Pepe the Frog.35 From the viewpoint of 1920s and 1930s fascism, such an image would appear degenerate: how could a figure that is clearly held up as the ideal from the white supremacist perspective (the European colonizer) be simultaneously undermined with the face of a frog? Even in the time of elections, in the campaigns for Brexit in the UK, for Trump in the US or for Lega Nord in Italy, there is little there that glorifies youth, coherence or beauty. Even the humble red hats of ‘Make America Great Again’ offer little in terms of a visual positive ideal of what such greatness would look like. Without positive visual ideas, what is the vision of subjecthood that such political positions present? Is it one of coherent resolute autonomy, of disconnected drives and desires, or something else altogether? While much attention has been paid to how alt-right and populist visual producers represent their opinions, less thought has been given to how they represent themselves. In this respect, one of Jon Rafman’s ‘anthropological’ artworks is highly informative. Still Life (Betamale) (2013) presents the world of the antisocial computer-game nerds, the self-declared ‘betamales’, whose subculture strongly intersects with that of (alt-right) trolls and that strange world of online masculinity known as the ‘manosphere’.36 Rafman’s video shows computers covered in cigarette butts and scraps of junk food; video PiPs show computer-game violence and people in furry fetish costumes. Meanwhile, a seductive female voiceover narrates a transformation: ‘As you

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look at the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity.’ The physical body self-destructs, but the digital self embarks on a journey of unbridled wish fulfilment. The ideal subject of the alt-right visual culture, as represented in Jon Rafman’s video, is not so much a subject of resolute action, but a jumble of drives searching for a limit-experience, which seems interestingly close to the subjectivity explored by the Dadaists or the Surrealists. Curiously, however, even those of Rafman’s works, which show the artist’s own internal world (his Dream Journal of 2016–19), follow an analogous aesthetic form. Finally, the third parallel between historical Dada and alt-right visual production is the participatory, collective authorship. As evident in the Berlin Dada journals, such as Neue Jugend or Der blutige Ernst, the Dada artists often abjured individual authorship; they favoured the collective making that revealed internal fractions and antagonisms. Individual contributions to journals could be anonymized, and presented as opposing each other.37 Within the online visual culture of our own day, social, community-based, sharing, interactive and grassroots aspects are similarly often emphasized.38 The production of memes and similar cultural outputs thrives on mutual antagonism, on a violent clash of positions, on ‘trolling’.39 This bears resemblance to the Dadaists’ emphasis on internal conflict, on ‘un-community’ as Hans Richter called it.40 The visual traces of such conflict are comparable, too. A Dada magazine like Der blutige Ernst (1919) attempted to create a sense of conflict by violent images, by mixing of different typefaces and by overlaying of text. That same sense of cacophony exists on 4chan and 8chan boards (and, indeed, even on mainstream platforms like Twitter). Within this final comparison, however, we must acknowledge a heightened dis-analogy with contemporary digital art. Within contemporary digital art collage, the mode of production remains highly individualized and non-antagonistic, as befits these works’ status as commercially viable contemporary art. We may summarize our three-part comparison into the following table: Original Dada

Alt-right visual production

Contemporary art digital collage

Transgressive humour

Enacted

Enacted

Enacted

Disjointed subjecthood

Enacted and represented

Enacted and represented

Represented

Antagonistic, ‘un-collective’ mode of production

Enacted

Enacted

Not enacted

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Of course, such comparisons must be thought of as provisional, especially since the production we are describing is very much still developing. Contemporary art changes styles as quickly as the market demands; and the visual culture of the alt-right is a fast-changing beast as well, and may have already supplemented the nonsense aesthetic of memes with more hardhitting propaganda. Nevertheless, the overarching point here is that investigations into any contemporary digital art must also take stock of the broader cultural movements, in particular the new fascisms and polarizations that the digital revolution has nurtured. In the early 2010s, Helen Marten’s mumbo-jumbo installations and the cacophonic posturing of Ryan Trecartin might have appeared as harmless, madcap reflections of just how ditzy and stupid the new digital age is making us all. By 2020, an art practice that embraces the randomness and irreverence of the internet has a much darker reference point to contend with.

Notes *

Some of the analysis in this paper has appeared in two previous, shorter articles: ‘Digital Art and the Alt-Right’ in The Point magazine (September 2018), and ‘Dada Data, the Alt-Right and Scepticism’ in the catalogue to the Reality Machines exhibition, curated by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra at CRASSH, University of Cambridge in June 2018.

1 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 106. 2 Gene McHugh, Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art 12.29.09>09.05.10 (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011); Omar Kholeif, ed., You Are Here: Art after the Internet (Manchester: Home and Space, 2015). 3 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 106. 4 Ibid., 101–36; Sherwin Simmons, ‘Neue Jugend: A Case Study in Berlin Dada,’ in David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016). 5 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (New York: Verso, 2017). 6 Helen Marten, ‘My Influences’, Frieze, 6 December 2016, https://frieze.com/ article/helen-marten-my-influences (29.06.2020). 7 Jennifer Chan, ‘Why Are There No Great Women Net Artists? Vague Histories of Female Contribution: According to Video and Internet Art’, pool (2011), http://pooool.info/why-are-there-no-great-women-net-artists-2/ (29.06.2020). 8 Jon Rafman and Felix Petty, ‘Jon Rafman’s Internet Anthropology (Interview with Jon Rafman)’, i-D Vice, 14 October 2015, https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/ article/9kbp4e/jon-rafmans-internet-anthropology (29.06.2020). 9 Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 114. 10 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 104.

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11 Oliver J. J. Lane, ‘Watch: The Anti-Migrant Video Going Viral across Europe,’ Breitbart News, 11 November 2015, https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2015/ 11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/ (29.03.2020). 12 Philip Kleinfeld, ‘Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Video Taking the Internet by Storm’, VICE UK , https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ppx4kg/ with-open-gates-the-forced-collective-suicide-of-european-nationsdebunked-938 (23.03.2020). 13 Lane, ‘Watch’. 14 No author, ‘Bitcoin Webpage’, https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ybX4 9kKFNN7hKnrzaegnha4Fy9WrFATu (02.01.2018). 15 Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 16 M. Abedkar, ‘The Aesthetics of the Alt-Right’, Post-Office Art Jorunal online, http://baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/ (01.02.2018); Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (New York: Data and Society Research Institute, 2017); Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester/Washington, DC: zero books, 2017); Emily Apter, ‘Micropolitics of Memes’, in Slavs and Tatars, eds, Crack up, Crack Down: The 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, ed. (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2019). 17 Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘The Art Right,’ Art Monthly 405 (2017). 18 Steyerl, Duty Free Art, 114. 19 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 107. 20 Cas Mudde, The Far Right in America (London: Routledge, 2017); David A. Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017); George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Chip Berlet, ed., Trumping Democracy in the United States: From Ronald Reagan to the Alt-Right (London: Routledge, 2018). 21 Carol Mason and Chip Berlet, ‘Swastikas in Cyberspace 1’, in Berlet, ed., Trumping Democracy in the United States, ch. 2. 22 Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 23 Ibid., 60ff. 24 Ibid., 28. 25 Ibid., 30. 26 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 113. 27 Abedkar, ‘The Aesthetics of the Alt-Right’; Nagle, Kill All Normies. 28 Savvas Zannettou et al., ‘On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities’, paper presented at the Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018. 29 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 28ff. 30 Nicholas Michelsen and Pablo De Orellana, ‘Discourses of Resilience in the Us Alt-Right’, Resilience 7:3 (2019): 274.

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31 George Monbiot, ‘From Trump to Johnson, Nationalists Are on the Rise – Backed by Billionaire Oligarchs’, The Guardian, 26 July 2019. 32 Anonymous, ‘Helen Marten at Chisenhale (Exhibition Booklet)’, (London: Chisenhale Art Gallery, 2012), 3. 33 Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 151. 34 Cf. Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism, 155ff. 35 Reprinted in Michelsen and De Orellana, ‘Discourses of Resilience’, 279. 36 Cf. Debbie Ging, ‘Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,’ Men and Masculinities 22, no. 4 (2017). 37 See Simmons, ‘Neue Jugend’. 38 An Xiao Mina, Memes to Movements (London: Penguin, 2019). 39 Ryan M Milner, ‘Fcj-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz’, The Fibreculture Journal 22 (2013). 40 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 122.

Bibliography Anonymous. ‘Helen Marten at Chisenhale (Exhibition Booklet)’. London: Chisenhale Art Gallery, 2012, p. 3. Abedkar, M. ‘The Aesthetics of the Alt-Right’. Post-Office Art Journal, http:// baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/. Antliff, Mark. Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2007. Apter, Emily. ‘Micropolitics of Memes’. In Crack up, Crack Down: The 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, edited by Slavs and Tatars. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2019. Berlet, Chip, ed. Trumping Democracy in the United States: From Ronald Reagan to the Alt-Right. London: Routledge, 2018. Biro, Matthew. The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Chan, Jennifer. ‘Why Are There No Great Women Net Artists? Vague Histories of Female Contribution: According to Video and Internet Art’. pool (2011), http:// pooool.info/why-are-there-no-great-women-net-artists-2/. Ging, Debbie. ‘Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere’. Men and Masculinities 22:4 (2017): 638–57. Gogarty, Larne Abse. ‘The Art Right’. Art Monthly 405 (2017): 6–10. Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Kholeif, Omar, ed. You Are Here: Art after the Internet. Manchester: Home and Space, 2015. Kleinfeld, Philip. ‘Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Video Taking the Internet by Storm’. VICE UK , https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ppx4kg/with-opengates-the-forced-collective-suicide-of-european-nations-debunked-938.

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Lane, Oliver J. J. ‘Watch: The Anti-Migrant Video Going Viral across Europe’. Breitbart News, 11 November 2015, https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2015/11/ 11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/. Marten, Helen. ‘My Influences’. Frieze, 6 December 2016, https://frieze.com/article/ helen-marten-my-influences. Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. New York: Data and Society Research Institute, 2017. Mason, Carol, and Chip Berlet. ‘Swastikas in Cyberspace 1’. In Trumping Democracy in the United States: From Ronald Reagan to the Alt-Right, edited by Chip Berlet, ch. 2. London: Routledge, 2018. McHugh, Gene. Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art 12.29.09>09.05.10. Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011. Michelsen, Nicholas, and Pablo De Orellana. ‘Discourses of Resilience in the Us Alt-Right’. Resilience 7:3 (2019): 271–87. Milner, Ryan M. ‘Fcj-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz’. The Fibreculture Journal 22 (2013): 62–92. Mina, An Xiao. Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power. London: Penguin, 2019. Monbiot, George. ‘From Trump to Johnson, Nationalists Are on the Rise – Backed by Billionaire Oligarchs’. The Guardian, 26 July 2019. Mudde, Cas. The Far Right in America. London: Routledge, 2017. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester/Washington, DC : zero books, 2017. Neiwert, David A. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. London: Verso, 2017. No author. ‘Bitcoin Webpage’. https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1ybX49kK FNN7hKnrzaegnha4Fy9WrFATu. Rafman, Jon, and Felix Petty. ‘Jon Rafman’s Internet Anthropology (Interview with Jon Rafman)’. i-D Vice, 14 October 2015, https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/ article/9kbp4e/jon-rafmans-internet-anthropology. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Translated by David Britt. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013. Simmons, Sherwin. ‘Neue Jugend: A Case Study in Berlin Dada’. In A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, edited by David Hopkins, ch. 2 (electronic edition). Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2016. Steyerl, Hito. Duty Free Art. New York: Verso, 2017. Zannettou, Savvas, et al. ‘On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities’. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018.

IOCOSE

Dadasourcing Dadasourcing is a collection of images generated via crowdsourcing. The group IOCOSE has commissioned from anonymous online workers a series of photos via platforms such as Microworkers.com. Crowdworkers take jobs from anywhere in the world, and are paid through micro-transactions, ranging from £0.10 to £2. For this project, crowdworkers have been asked to go in a public place and hold signs with slogans taken from the DADA manifesto by Tristan Tzara, to commemorate its centenary. The four images published in this volume represent a selection of the work collected through the process. Crowdsourcing, made popular by services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, appeared around 2005 with the promise of gathering the collective intelligence of the globe. It is now mostly used by IT companies to outsource tasks towards countries where labour is significantly cheaper, reinforcing pre-existing economic inequalities. For instance, Amazon is currently crowdsourcing users’ questions that the voice-controlled artificial assistant Alexa cannot answer. In so doing, crowdsourcing makes global dynamics of exploitation invisible, and imagines digital labour as if it was frictionless and performed by non-human actors. IOCOSE have been working with crowdsourcing platforms since 2012, imagining alternative uses for its failed promises. With this project they have been bringing to the fore the faces of the workers involved, and the ideological and technical structures that make them invisible through platform labour. The artists appropriate the exploitative and colonialist dynamics of crowdsourcing, while experimenting ways of undoing them as part of the same gesture, and exploring their potential for creative, critical and surrealist acts. Previously, IOCOSE have been drawing on crowdsourcing to generate images of people protesting against conspiracy theories, which were in their own turn written by crowdworkers (A Crowded Apocalypse, 2012); to sell images of custom protesters on eBay (Instant Protest, 2017); and to create a YouTube playlist that, once played in the right order, instructs on how to assemble a bomb (How to Make a Bomb, 2013).

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IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Dada means nothing), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Boom boom), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists. 262

IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Abolition of the future), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Everything we look at is false), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists. 263

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pixel Pirates: Theft as Strategy in the Art of Joan Ross and Soda Jerk Jaime Tsai

The strategy of theft – of stealing the materials of the world in order to reorganize them according to a new, stridently political criteria – was first used by the Dada photomonteurs of Berlin. Its legacy can be traced to the present through a variety of critical practices including Soviet montage, Surrealist dialectics, cut-up poetry, New Realist and Fluxus dé-collage, Situationist détournement, femmage, and rap and hip-hop, before its ultimate realization in remixed video art. The era of dissent initiated by Dadaist photomontage is resurrected today in contemporary remix art. In 1920 Raoul Hausmann wrote, ‘[T]he dada person recognises no past which might tie him down, he is held up by the living present, by his existence . . . DaDa organises the world according to its own criteria, it uses all the existing forms and habits in order to beat the moralistic, self-righteous bourgeois world at its own game.’1 While the ‘living present’ for Hausmann was dominated by print media, in our information age it is dominated by the internet, which is currently no less centralized and opportunistic than its counterpart one hundred years ago. Artists such as Hausmann initiated political dialogue through the static medium of photomontage, whereas contemporary remix artists achieve similar ends by pilfering still and moving images from the swampy ephemera of the internet. My focus is the flourishing moving-image scene in Australia, where artists are particularly drawn to Dadaist remixing as it suits the critical and detached perspective that derives from a keen awareness of Australia’s 267

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peripheral position geographically and culturally.2 I will address two works by the sister duo Soda Jerk (Dominique and Dan Angeloro): Hollywood Burn (2006) and The Was (with The Avalanches, 2016), and Joan Ross’s The claiming of things (2012). Soda Jerk’s Hollywood Burn steals from hundreds of films and TV shows to challenge the corporate monopoly of culture through copyright, and The Was reimagines rebellion in a social media era that co-opts traditional subcultural tactics and transforms them into marketing strategies.3 Joan Ross’s The claiming of things is a revisionist history of Australia that frames colonization as theft by stealing the nineteenth-century imagery integral to the British narrative of possession. In looking at these examples drawn from the larger project of remix video in Australia, which might include Tracey Moffatt, Deborah Kelly and Tara Marynowsky, to name a few, I hope to establish a vital link between Dadaist strategies and a demand for social justice, which for Ross and Soda Jerk are currently remote from the national political agenda. Photomontage was conceived as a political weapon from its origins, whether the origins were with George Grosz and John Heartfield (1915–16) or Hausmann and Hannah Höch (1918).4 Either way, approximately a hundred years ago, these Berlin Dadaists first described themselves as photomonteurs – mechanics or engineers, rather than aesthetes and artists. Their materials were derived from the contemporary mass media, and like Hugo Ball’s phonetic poems before them, they wished to ‘renounce the language that journalism [had] abused and corrupted’ by subverting its totalizing narratives.5 In his persuasive book on the reconstructive impulse of the photomonteur’s cyborg imagery, Matthew Biro argues that, just as the act of cutting and pasting was a metaphor for reshuffling the ‘orders of the real’, so, too, was fragmentation and reconstruction a metaphor for the trauma and complexity of the Weimar period.6 For the German Dadaists, the initial hope in democracy and equality following the Kaiser’s abdication was quickly quelled with political violence and economic instability due to unemployment, foreign debt and hyperinflation. Biro notes that ‘as the economy deteriorated, the old forms of racism and discrimination became more prevalent and virulent again, bringing fear and instability in their wake’.7 In fact, the photomonteurs confronted a situation not dissimilar to many parts of the Western world following the global financial crisis and deindustrialization in the twenty-first century. In 1931, Hausmann declared that the Dadaists ‘were the first to use the material of photography to combine heterogeneous, often contradictory structures, figurative and spatial, into a new whole that was in effect a mirror image wrenched from the chaos of war and revolution, as new to the eye as it was to the mind’.8 Club Dada, he argued, had no interest in the dogmatism of new aesthetic rules; on the contrary, they wished to address new forms of material expression to cultural criticism. By stealing and recontextualizing the materials of their opponents, they ‘attacked political events of the day with biting sarcasm’.9

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The radical discontinuities of photomontage were inspired by the emergence of the moving image. Calling to mind cinematic clashes of temporalities, environments and perspectives, Hausmann described photomontage as a type of ‘static film’.10 Heartfield and Grosz also worked closely with film companies, and all three frequently incorporated cinematic iconography into their works.11 For example, Grosz and Heartfield’s Life and Activity in the Universal City (1919) includes a celluloid ribbon, and Hausmann’s Self-Portrait of the Dadasoph (1920) features a film projector mounted to the head of a manmachine hybrid. Although Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on mechanically reproduced art was not conceived until the mid-1930s, there is little doubt that the Dadaists appreciated the medium’s accessibility to the masses, and its potential for political enlightenment and social criticism. Hausmann understood that the potential of photomontage and film was far from exhausted, and claimed that there are as many possibilities for their future as there are changes in the environment.12 The Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács described photomontage as a powerful political weapon insofar as it recognizes the complexity of reality. It fails, however, if like Hollywood film of the time, it ‘gives shape’ to the world by transforming it into a ‘seamless totality’.13 The implication is that without its characteristic discontinuities, photomontage risks replacing one form of propaganda with another. The complex and jarring quality of Berlin photomontage, derived from the overt theft and political recontextualization of its source materials, was resuscitated a few decades later in Australian moving-image works. The emergence of video art in Australia coincided with the promise of sweeping social change and a conceptual art environment disillusioned with traditional media, the art market and institutional spaces. Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party ended over two decades of conservative Liberal Party policies in 1972, and established free Video Access Centres.14 Inspired by the experiments of Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell in the United States, early video art resisted the elitism of the art world, on the one hand, and the insidious mass influence of television – the new technological reality – on the other.15 By the 1980s, new music videos saturated television with ‘sampling’ aesthetics that were emphatically adopted by artists. Mobilizing what he described as ‘the disruptive energy of montage’, Peter Callas’s frenetic video Night’s High Noon: An Anti Terrain (1988) is a collision of motifs derived from the Australian collective imagination.16 Vincent Van Gogh, the idolized outlaw Ned Kelly and Australian Aboriginals appear on pulsating, intersecting planes that compositionally allude to post-impressionism, abstract expressionism, and Indigenous dot-painting. The appropriated imagery signals the theft of Indigenous culture, language and land in the creation of an Australian mythology. Created in Australia’s bicentenary year celebrating the arrival of the British First Fleet, Callas used the radical new medium to reveal the fundamental instability of Australian national identity. Theft was hard-wired into the aesthetics of Australian video art from the beginning. The Sydney Super 8 Group combined stolen and new footage in

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the 1980s to make direct attacks on the modernist values of originality, authenticity and unified style. Theft was recognized as a postmodern strategy suited to combatting modern grand narratives.17 Ross Harley, an early member of the Sydney Super 8 Group, argued that their low-fi videos emerged at a time when Video Home System (VHS) viewing, recording and distribution systems were giving rise to ‘new ways of engaging in the flow of images and sounds that were circulating in the cultural sphere’.18 By 1993, 80 per cent of Australian households had a videocassette recorder (VCR).19 Because VCRs were not simply play-back devices, but also recorders, domestic theft and sharing of TV shows and films was virtually encouraged; in fact, analogue videotape (VHS) was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording and stealing television without permission.20 Lucas Hilderbrand argues that ‘the coinciding eras of analog magnetic tape and of fair-use copyright exemptions constitute a significant historical period, one marked by actual and potential democratic participation enabled by technology that gave way to largely taken-for-granted privileges and consumptive uses’.21 Video in its early activist phase used the buzzword ‘access’ for these new modes of production and the democratization of technology. It introduced a means of cultural production that was relatively affordable, portable and easy to use. The visionaries involved in the journal Radical Software saw video as a tool to be used in establishing ‘alternative media content for communicating countercultural ideas outside the restrictions of mainstream channels’.22 In fact, CD and DVD technology aimed to circumvent the consumer freedom and accessibility unique to VHS, potentially prolonging its popularity. In the work of the Sydney Super 8 group, as well as the contemporary videos of Soda Jerk that use analogue-found footage, nostalgia for the golden age of theft with VHS is self-consciously indexed with the medium-specific characteristics of video, such as wear and technical failure, or glitches. Hilderbrand argues that this insistence on ‘video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures’.23 Soda Jerk’s Hollywood Burn is both legally and historically transgressive. It is a montage of analogue footage that gleefully exposes the glitch artefacts, such as skewing and dropout, that signal the golden age of access. Hollywood Burn attacks the corporate control of the cultural sphere by lifting and splicing hundreds of sources (both sound and image) from American films and TV shows protected by copyright. Running at over fifty minutes, and taking four years to complete, it is an epic feat of digital piracy (Figure 14.1). Devoid of any original source material, it displaces the found footage from its cinematic cohesiveness into a new narrative of ‘viral fragments’.24 The video starts with the Pixel Pirate mission statement unfurling from the ether in the familiar format of the Star Wars series. Narrated with a variety of stolen voices, their mission is declared: ‘[T]o preserve freedom and justice battling the forces of tyranny and evil in every corner of the film and video security office.’ The all-star cast, including Elvis

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FIGURE 14.1 Soda Jerk with Sam Smith, Hollywood Burn, 2006. Digital video, 52 minutes. Courtesy the artists.

Presley, Kurt Russell, the Ghostbusters, Batman, the Hulk and The Hoff derives from the Hollywood entertainment industry that has overwhelmed Australian culture for the last forty years; but in a sense, Hollywood Burn is as much an ode to childhood heroes as it is an indictment of American cultural imperialism. Just as the Berlin photomonteurs traded on the familiarity of printed mass media, so, too, does Soda Jerk trust in the ubiquity of Hollywood in middle-class homes. Soda Jerk describe the project made with the editing help of Sydney artist Sam Smith as ‘part trash cinema and part remix manifesto’ that adopts ‘the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic codes’.25 So if Hollywood Burn is a remix manifesto, what is remix? The word ‘remix’ originates in hip-hop and the DJ turntablism pioneered by Grandmaster Flash. Flash’s characteristic celebration of pop culture, incisive social commentary, and technical mastery of editing and mixing informed the remix culture that emerged in the 1990s: the era of digital video cameras, user-friendly editing software and, of course, the internet. These technologies offered the utopian promise of media decentralization and democratized production. Just like the Dadaists, remixers are optimistic about their current technological environment, and in the information age, the potential to subvert familiar materials for political ends is limitless. Any

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person with a computer and access to the internet has a vast digitized world at their fingertips, giving them the potential to generate infinite variations from a single reference source. The media theorist Lev Manovich argues that the greatest influence on the new hybrid visual language of remix was the Adobe software After Effects (1993). Designed for animation, compositing and special effects, After Effects was to the moving image what Photoshop was to the photographic still, and it continues to be used globally by media companies, designers and artists. According to Manovich, what gets remixed today, however, ‘is not only the content of different media or simply their aesthetics, but their fundamental techniques, working methods, languages, and assumptions’.26 Artists who remix are therefore rewriting cultural meaning and its codification, transmission and reception. The remix artist is a sponge in a world of delirious associations. Instead of the direct, cynical form of appropriation adopted in postmodernism, remix is a playful, but no less incisive, acknowledgement of the object as a trace of history and collective memory. In this sense remix opens up history as a discourse rather than fact; for remixers, all of the assumptions of our simulacral society are up for grabs. This is particularly important in our current information age, with threats to net neutrality, the proliferation of fake news, the corporate resistance to cultural commons, and the concentration of power among a few companies on the web. Google, for example, accounts for about 87 per cent of online searches globally, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, has recently decried this corporate control over which ideas are shared, calling it a ‘weaponisation of the internet’.27 The Sydney-based artist Joan Ross has dedicated her practice to revising the grand narratives of Australian history, in particular the fake news that Australia was ‘found’ rather than ‘stolen’. As colonialist imagery was one of the many tools of occupation, she uses the painting of British-born Tasmanian John Glover in The claiming of things (Figure 14.2) as a backdrop. The most important early colonial painter of his time, Glover domesticated the Australian landscape that the British considered to be desolate, unforgiving and ‘without history’, by softening its contours and turning the trunks of gums into rhythmic arabesques.28 Arriving in Tasmania too late to see Palawa people living freely in the bush, Glover invented a deceptively serene Arcadian landscape that became part of Australian mythology.29 Aboriginal figures appear in the landscape as indexes of exoticism, without identity, and seamlessly integrated into the surrounding flora and fauna.30 The palpable absence of colonial intervention in Glover’s painting is countered in Ross’s remix with the introduction of a wealthy British couple impractically dressed in finery. Derived from Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting Mr and Mrs William Hallett, the young couple take centre stage and claim the land as their own by brazenly tagging it with graffiti. When situated in a landscape, traditional portraits such as these symbolize land ownership and the power and prestige of the sitters. As a Scottish migrant, Ross identifies with Mrs Hallett as a newcomer attempting to understand her place in an ancient

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FIGURE 14.2 Joan Ross, ‘The naming of things’, The claiming of things, 2012. Digital video, 7:36 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney. landscape. She even gave Mrs Hallett some of her own facial features in the process of transforming her into a moving figure. Nevertheless, Ross distances herself from her behaviour: ‘I’m not a rock defacer! I despise the superiority, recklessness, and racism demonstrated by her graffiti . . . the idea of someone spray-painting the natural environment, not to mention that the rock could be a sacred site, is appalling to me, a very ignorant attitude.’31 The graffiti reads ‘Bank$ia’, and simultaneously refers to the street artist Banksy, the financial institution, and a suburb and genus of trees named after the English botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who was on James Cook’s first voyage to Australia in 1770. These references imply that the naming and cataloguing of land, flora and fauna constitutes an aggressive act of colonial possession. A fluorescent yellow picket fence also divides the foreground from the background in a domestic, yet ostentatious display of private ownership. Hi-Vis fluorescent yellow is Ross’s signature colour, and she uses it as a metaphor for the pervasive forces of white colonialism and its legacy in the power dynamics of contemporary Australia. She claims that since 9/11, ‘wearing a fluorescent Hi-Vis vest gives you the power to do anything you want to the land . . . just as the British colonists did in Australia. It functions in a paradoxical state of both omnipresence and invisibility’.32 In this sense, Hi-Vis has a function similar to that of state-sanctioned monuments in its banality and ubiquity (which renders it invisible) and its omnipresent authoritarianism (which maintains a mythology of possession). The power of The claiming of things is contingent on its self-conscious collage aesthetic. Ross keyframe animates still images, intentionally retaining the clumsy, stilted movement unique to the process. By maintaining this

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‘handmade’ flatness in her revisionist history remix, she explicitly avoids the ‘seamless totality’ Lukács warned about, and echoes the Dada photomonteur’s strategy of using clashing alternate realities to challenge the passive acceptance of our own. Like many avant-garde techniques and strategies, Dada-inspired remix is not immune to being co-opted as a capitalist marketing tool. The current Web 2.0 internet landscape has evolved from a simple platform for publishing content to a space for altering and sharing it through social media, where the copy-and-paste tactic, piracy itself, has become ‘just another business model’.33 Social media platforms are used to disseminate twenty-firstcentury manifestos, except that all expressions of individuality and creativity are curtailed and homogenized by the interface. According to Manovich, these applications give users ‘unlimited space for storage, and plenty of tools to organize, promote, and broadcast their thoughts, opinions, behaviour, and media’; they are self-consciously designed for ‘hackability’ and modular ‘remixability’, encouraging the prosumer to spend more time online, and making more money for the company by serving ads, sharing individual data with other companies, and offering in-app purchases and add-ons.34 In other words, countercultural tactics are now used as marketing strategies, and traditional copyright laws are becoming increasingly obsolete. Soda Jerk understand that the greatest obstacle to political resistance is the way ‘hyper-capitalism is able to co-opt, consume and commodify the forms and aesthetics of resistance’.35 They therefore distinguish between two different forms of remix, one that is critically engaged with art history, and the mass, online form that has been subsumed by the culture industry: ‘[W]hat was once conceived as a tactical assault on commodity culture has for many, become a commonplace way of consuming culture. While most visual remix artists continue to ask themselves “why remix?”, online remix culture seems to have deleted that question with a simple “why not?”.’36 Rebellion in our contemporary age of ‘punk capitalism’ is more difficult than ever, but Soda Jerk and The Avalanches’s The Was (Figures 14.3 and 14.4) offers a playful alternative to the co-option of remix for commercial purposes. Running for thirteen minutes and forty seconds, The Was is a nostalgic journey through the sights and sounds associated with growing up in the 1980s and 90s. It is a collective work, made once more with the editing help of Smith, and with a soundtrack by quintessential Australian remix musicians The Avalanches. The Avalanches are dependent on samples for their music, and like Soda Jerk, corporate theft is a deliberate and explicit demonstration of their support for a cultural commons. The Was lacks a traditional narrative, but foregrounds the importance of youth culture in destabilizing conservative values and the status quo. It is a celebration of countercultural rebellion of the past, recontextualized as a call to arms in the present. The remixed protagonists include skaters, breakers, queers, punks and riot grrrls, Jamaican rockers, and representatives of the French New Wave and Greek Weird Wave. The Was tracks through a sequence of

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FIGURE 14.3 Soda Jerk & The Avalanches, The Was, 2016. Digital video, 13:40 minutes. Courtesy the artists.

FIGURE 14.4 Soda Jerk & The Avalanches, The Was, 2016. Digital video, 13:40 minutes. Courtesy the artists.

evocative spaces that represent typical middle-class existence in the West – the subway, the supermarket and suburbia. Each of these scenes is dominated by acts of rebellion. In the subway, a space intended for commuting between home and work, a dance party breaks out between several countercultural heroes, and a kid on roller skates transforms the civic architecture into a space of play. In the supermarket, consumerism is subverted with acts of theft and in-store gluttony, commodities are ecstatically destroyed, and a

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loose pack of dogs signals an absence of law and order. The final scenes in suburbia take place along Dorothy’s yellow brick road from the Wizard of Oz, where queer lovers embrace, and rioting teens hurl Molotov cocktails until the cookie-cutter houses are consumed in flames. Although these sites of rebellion are completely fictional, they are also deeply familiar dioramas of the late twentieth century, as suffocating and repressive as they are vulnerable to the transformative power of collective action. In Soda Jerk’s words: The rebellion and muckraking that occurs in The Was is really our way of paying deep respects to a refusal to behave, fit in, or play by the rules. After all, why accept the shitty normative world that we’ve all been dealt? Queer the streets, run riot in the supermarket, dance battle in the subways, reimagine an empty swimming pool as a vertical skate ramp. These moments aren’t just forms of destruction or misuse, but also forms of collective action that unleash a magic in the everyday. They’re a form of world building.37 The Was is also punctuated with scenes of drug-induced euphoria. In one scene (stolen from Citizen Ruth, 1996) we see Laura Dern huffing spraypaint fumes from a paper bag. The splitting of reality that follows features psychedelic scenes of swirling ocean life, and flying farm animals from the Wizard of Oz (1939) that magically animate the suburbs. In addition to signalling another avenue of liberation, the experience of ‘tripping’ evokes the delirious and dislocated nature of remix, where collective memory and history become unstuck, and – in the slippage of meaning – the remixer and viewer, rather than the copyright owner, are masters of the narrative. The Was suggests that rebellion is possible in everyday life by using spaces, objects and images in ways for which they were never intended, and software and apps, Soda Jerk argue, ‘can also be misused, hacked or reimagined’.38 The sister duo described the painstaking production of The Was as ‘living together inside a deep rotoscoping k-hole’, where a couple of seconds of footage takes days to complete.39 Their collective and process-driven practice approximates the Berlin photomonteurs, who called themselves mechanics or engineers rather than bourgeois artists.40 Furthermore, like John Heartfield, who published his photomontages through left-wing journals, Soda Jerk refused to sell The Was as an artwork or through the music industry, publishing it on the internet, where it is not for sale, but free for everyone.41 Australian remix artists understand that fighting for social justice often requires guerrilla tactics and civil disobedience, and this is particularly true for Soda Jerk, who proudly ‘fly the pirate flag high’.42 Australian video artists have revived the Dada-inspired strategy of theft to challenge the ownership of language in a post-truth era. Using the explicit cut-and-paste technique of the photomonteurs before them, the transgressive potential of analogue technologies and the self-reflexive practice of critical

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remix, they challenge our passive acceptance of knowledge in the form we receive it. Pixel pirates such as Soda Jerk and Joan Ross remix traditional narratives and popular culture to draw attention to the colonial violence and structural inequalities underpinning Australian national mythology. Given that Australia was founded by convicts, and colonial possession was predicated on theft, Australian video artists are particular adept at stealing from the past in order to secure social justice for the future.

Notes 1 Raoul Hausmann, ‘DADA in Europe’, in Dawn Ades, ed., The Dada Reader, a critical anthology, trans. Jean Boase-Beier (London: Tate, 2006), 93. 2 John Conomos, Mutant Media. Australian moving image history (Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney: Power Publications, 2007), 158. 3 Lev Manovich, ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?’, Critical Inquiry 35:2 (2009): 319–31. 4 Who invented photomontage is still a matter of debate. Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 19–20. 5 Hugo Ball, original text written in 1916, published posthumously in John Elderfield, ed., Flight Out of Time, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 71. 6 Matthew Teitelbaum, ‘Preface’, in Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1992), 7. 7 Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 83. 8 Raoul Hausmann, ‘Photomontage’ (1931) in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Aperture, 1989), 179. 9 Ibid.,178. 10 Ibid. 11 Heartfield worked as set designer for special effects films at Grünbaum-Film between 1917 and 1920. Heartfield and Grosz collaborated on projects with the Universum Film A.G. (UFA or BUFA) from 1917. Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 87. 12 Hausmann, ‘Photomontage’, 179. 13 György Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’ (1938) in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor, afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977), 43. 14 Daniel Palmer, ‘Medium Without a Memory: Australian Video Art’, in Red, Green, Blue: A History of Australian Video Art (Gold Coast: Griffith University Art Museum, 2017), 159.

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15 See John G. Hanhardt, ‘De-collage/Collage: Notes Toward a Reexamination of the origins of Video Art’, in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds, Illuminating Video: an Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture, 1990). 16 Peter Callas, ‘Peter Callas Interviewed by Nicolas Zurbrugg’, in ‘Electronic Arts in Australia’, Continuum 8:1 (1994): 115. 17 Mark Titmarsh, ‘Stickin’ it to the man’, in Syncity (Sydney: d/Lux/MediaArts, 2006), 13. 18 Ross Harley, ‘FCJ-100 Cultural Modulation and The Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art’, The Fibreculture Journal 15 (2009) (12/03/2018), http://fifteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-100-culturalmodulation-and-the-zero-originality-clause-of-remix-culture-in-australiancontemporary-ar/. 19 Marc C-Scott, ‘Please rewind: A final farewell to the VCR ’, The Conversation, ABC News, updated 2 August 2016, 11:59 am, http://www.abc.net.au/ news/2016-08-01/vcr-a-final-farewell/7676598 (12/3/2018). 20 Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC : Duke University Press: 2009), 5. 21 Ibid., 7–8. 22 Kate Horsfield, ‘Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art’, in Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2006), 3. 23 Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice, 5. 24 Dan Angeloro, ‘Thoughtware: Contemporary Online Remix Culture’, in Syncity (Sydney: d/Lux/MediaArts, 2006), 18. 25 Soda Jerk, ‘Hollywood Burn’, in Tactical Media Files, 2011, http://www. tacticalmediafiles.net/videos/4618/Hollywood-Burn-_trailer_;jsessionid=E4817 EBFBD982FB74C227D910D64BDC6 (14/03/2018). 26 Lev Manovich, ‘After Effects, or Velvet Revolution’, Artifact 1:2 (2007): 67 (italics mine). 27 Olivia Solon, ‘Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent “weaponised” web’, 11 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2018/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-tech-companies-regulations. 28 See, in particular, Marcus Clarke’s description of the landscape in ‘Australian Scenery’ in the preface of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1867), reprinted in Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume (Melbourne: Cameron, Laing, 1884), 114–15. 29 On Aboriginal genocide in Tasmania, see Tom Lawson, ‘Memorializing colonial genocide in Britain: the case of Tasmania’, Journal of Genocide Research 16:4 (2014): 441–61; and Colin Tatz, ‘Australia: The “Good” Genocide Perpetrator?’, Health and History 18:2 (2016): 85–98. 30 Anne Gray, ed., Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2002), https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG. cfm?IRN=180222. 31 Joan Ross, interview with the author in Jaime Tsai, ed., CAUGHT STEALING (Sydney: National Art School, 2019), 55.

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32 Joan Ross, Post Colonial Fluorescence (MFA diss., University of New South Wales Art and Design, Sydney, 2012), 24. 33 Harley, ‘FCJ-100 Cultural Modulation’. 34 Manovich, ‘The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life’, 325. 35 Soda Jerk, unpublished interview with author, 2018. 36 Angeloro, ‘Thoughtware’, 25. 37 Soda Jerk, interview with the author in CAUGHT STEALING , 53. 38 Soda Jerk, unpublished interview with author, 2018. 39 Soda Jerk, interview with the author in CAUGHT STEALING , 50–1. 40 Briony Wright, ‘soda_jerk remix cinema history to create the best movies that never existed’, interview with Soda Jerk, 10 January 2017, https://i-d.vice.com/ en_au/article/gyqeb9/soda-jerk-remix-cinema-history-to-create-the-bestmovies-that-never-existed. 41 Heartfield mainly worked for two publications: the daily Die Rote Fahne and the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ). 42 Soda Jerk, unpublished interview with the author, 2018.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Precarious Data Aesthetics: An Exploration of Tactics, Tricksters and Idiocy in Data Annet Dekker

Precarious data aesthetics can be described as a political construct or action that is based on social, technical and aesthetic relations. Moving from the loss of safety and social security to the conscious acts of transcoding, flickering and blurring in media where low-definition, ‘poor’ images and analogue nostalgia are recurring practices, the precarious data characteristics are similar to the situations, methods and aesthetics of tactical media art. Tactical media artists are known for their hit-and-run interventions in the media sphere combining the power of art, the tricks of the PR and advertising world, and an experimental approach to media. As expressed by David Garcia, ‘the key principle to this day remains not so much to describe or explain but rather to do’.1 A recurring tactic is the notion and form of the ‘trickster’, who exploits the shifting boundary between fiction and reality.2 Rather than a temporary gesture the tactical is enduring: as stressed by Garcia, it is a ‘journey to strategic power . . . a political and even aesthetic choice that includes a repudiation of the logic of power itself’.3 Tactical media’s usage of precarious DIY tactics is combined with a proclivity for precarious situations where its disruptive power can be forceful and its outcomes are fragmentary and noisy due to the fugitive character of its acts. In this sense tactical media is often compared to Situationist, Fluxus and Dada, in particular as part of their methods of defamiliarization and disruption. Within the framework of precarious aesthetics, this chapter 280

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explores how Dadaist acts, and particularly their innovative use of portmanteaus and idiosyncratic constructions to enact defamiliarization and destabilization, are still visible in digital resistance and opportunistic acting in obfuscated data systems. Such practices examine the systems and operations that make up the assemblages of contemporary data, and show how Dada tactics pertain in contemporary digital infrastructures. In the process it will become clear how tactical media and Dada operate within the episteme of precarious aesthetics.

Dadaist tactics On 18 September 1910, a couple walking on a crowded Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh were arrested and incarcerated on charges of being ‘suspicious persons’.4 By dressing like a man and puffing a cigarette, the Baroness, and her spouse Felix Paul Greve, broke with gender stereotypes, bourgeoisie etiquette and sexual repression. The Baroness was one of the most pronounced and abstruse Dada artists at the time.5 For a long time, her existence and influence were downplayed or even ignored in most art historical accounts of Dada. Yet, at the time, her appearance and attitude were regarded as shocking, disruptive, as well as precarious. She would shave or colour her hair, glue stamps on her cheeks, or wear a brassiere made from tomato cans joined with a green ribbon.6 Her looks were early examples of performance art, and her sculpture and poetry critiqued the prudishness, conservatism, greed and shallowness of Western societies. Performance as a way of life, the sourcing of materials and ‘the serendipitous way they came into her hands were part of the total experience of her aesthetic’.7 The performativity and aesthetic were an ‘opening up of artistic production to the vicissitudes of reception such that the process of making meaning is itself marked as a political – and, specifically, gendered-act’.8 It is a performance best described as precarious aesthetics: a tension between transparency and opacity, and between the literal and the metaphorical, which is articulated and operates at the mercy of bodies and materials that are unstable and prone to fail. Similar to her performative lifestyle, in her poetry the Baroness pursued an acerbic and at times nonsensical approach to language. Yet, her absurdism is also explicit and direct, to the point of being outright non-acquiescent. This is particularly visible in one of her playful poems, A Dozen Cocktails--Please, where she strikes her tone right from the beginning (Figure 15.1):9 Her sexual references are prominent, but also carefully situated in the text to express her message. Starting with implicit metonyms ‘spinster lollypop’, it is quickly made clear that this is about the vibrator, ‘there’s the vibrator --- coy flappertoy!’. The succession of the words gives the poem rhythm, but also increases her critique and disdain towards the prudish society and conservatism of the time where even the ‘flappers’ were far too

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FIGURE 15.1 Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, A Dozen Cocktails--Please, 1920. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven papers. Special Collections and University Archives. University of Maryland Libraries.

decent for the Baroness.10 Likewise, by using a mix of American advertising, entertainment and Broadway jargon, all attention-seeking linguistic methods, she makes sharp cultural references to condoms as ‘dandy celluloid tubes - all sizes - Tinted diabolicaly as a bamboon’s hind complexion’, to pop phenomena, ‘yes - we have no bananas’, and by mimicking advertorials ‘say it with bolts’ and ‘an apple a day’. By appropriating and mixing the

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FIGURE 15.1 Continued.

different languages, she stripped them of their original meaning and instead creates confusion. While disguised as idiocy, she mocked the zeitgeist that pretended to be modern but at heart was still too restrained to be truly progressive. Yet the Baroness is also harsh and critical, which can be seen in the way she used the popular line ‘yes - we have no bananas’. In A Dozen Cocktails--Please the chorus line doesn’t have the same ludic entertainment purpose it is known for. Later in the verse where she sets up

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a dialogue mocking the ‘sissy poet’ who can be hired for anything, albeit that they will be troublesome, the song line foregrounds the darker side of the composed utopia. Her disregard for America’s two-faced culture also comes out in the narrator pretending to be intoxicated, ‘I feel woozy’. The intoxication allows the Baroness to say whatever she wants, but it also expresses her contempt, particularly in the face of America’s nationwide prohibition. Within the frame of drunkenness form follows function, a method she also pursued in the use of punctuation, dashes, exclamation and question marks – often set in contrasting red or green colours to emphasize their force. The dash in particular is seen as an intrusive mark, it urges the reader to pay attention to the words and their meanings, so that they personally experience the message the author wants to transmit.11 This was certainly the Baroness’s intention, as also remarked by Gammel and Zelzado: ‘The Baroness’s liberal use of the dash commands the arrangement of her lines and the shifting space of the page, ensuring that her poems, like her assemblage sculptures and self-made costumes, are safety-pinned or tightly wrapped in place for effect.’12 Furthermore, the use of portmanteau constructions, a linguistic blend of words, such as ‘coy flappertoy’, and in some of her other poems ‘phalluspistol’ and ‘kissambushed’, while being almost miniature poems in themselves, when pronounced they have a rhythmic crescendo. To enhance the performative effect she would also use abrupt breaks by inserting a slash / after a word, or create a militant or transgressive rhythm by applying optophonetics. Sometimes her portmanteaus are also a way to blur the distinctions between man and machine, nature and culture, similar to the way she adorned her own body with a mix of different found industrial goods and vegetables. While the Baroness’s relation with the escalating industrialization was not always positive, as can be seen in the above poem, ‘progress is ravishing . . . broadcast - - - - that’s the lightning idea! S.O.S. national shortage of - - - what?’, rather than anti-innovation, her attitude was one of anti-modern consumer culture. Moreover, like her sculptures and performances (including her own attire), her poetry shows a more equal balance in which the body and industry, culture and nature were bound together and existed together, perhaps as ‘orgasmic toast’.13 She was a fabrication of ‘a lived transgression of the boundaries of human-animalmachine’.14 Unsurprisingly for the time, her poems created confusion and controversy, and to some they were nothing but idiotic nonsense or even scandalous literary performances.15 Yet her tactics proved an effective way to provoke a response, as they forced the audience to participate and collaborate in enacting the tension between the text and the sounds. By disregarding the conventional, and through her tactical use of innovative language and her DIY attitude in general, the Baroness’s ‘acts’ are comparable to the wicked acts of a trickster, which provide pointed commentary by creating confusion. Within the current information overload of the ‘big data

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era’, amid the clutter of texts, images and video, similar tactics to the Baroness can still be found in poetic experiments.

Digital Dada On 29 September 2017, Dutch artist Constant Dullaart posted his first version of Phantom Love on Instagram. Dullaart is known for his exploration and subversion of the web as a medium of communication and distribution, in particular in relation to the technical and sociopolitical constraints that influence the use and experience of the web. Dullaart’s digital Dada can be seen in the use of metonyms, the search for the mundane in ‘readymade’ domain names, and by enacting his art by being Dull.16 With Phantom Love he broadened his tactics to use poetry and language to disrupt the conventional use of social media platforms. In a series of five performances, Dullaart uploaded lines of poetry to the Instagram accounts of semi-public organizations. Helped by an ‘army’ of Instagram accounts, several artificially constructed identities were made to recite the poems.17 Each account would deliver one line in turn as comments to a posted image for which he used several public organizations with questionable Instagram accounts: EU Council, US Customs Border Protection, Historic Green-Wood Cemetery, US Department of Homeland Security, and the Internet Society (an American non-profit that provides leadership in internet-related standards, education, access and policy). Dullaart’s fictitious accounts are used as new tools and actors for communication, albeit in ambiguous and disconcerting ways. At first sight the comments seem random, nonsensical and trivial. For example, the first two comments responding to an image posted by the US Department of Homeland Security (Figure 15.2) resemble regular responses, a critical and a positive reflection on the initial post, yet the next comment is more cryptic ‘cesarsantana420 to know ones way around’, and it is followed by another fifty or so arbitrary sentences. However, when reading one after the other, a strict and consistent pattern and rhythm emerge and the narrative unfolds. Speaking in tongues, Dullaart lets his forces recite consecutively, the stanza has a militant or techno narrative, and a chorus develops which is at once nonsensical and sensible, social and technical, prank and political statement. While the first poems still follow a functional cadence and rhyme, the later ones are increasingly complex: interspersed with additional punctuation marks, abstract symbols and emojis, creating visual patterns as well as signalling the often automated nonsensical response mechanisms on social media, and using words from different languages to create double meanings – for instance, ‘kind’ (English) and ‘kind’ (Dutch for ‘child’) further convolutes and confuses. These are tactics that resembled the mentioned poems of the Baroness. In the process of trying to find out who or what is speaking, what or who is spoken about, and how the comments relate to each other and to the main account, the reader becomes immersed in the

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FIGURE 15.2 Constant Dullaart, Phantom Love – Institutions Based on Lore, 2017. Screenshot.

intermingled identities and voices; some of them are human while others are propelled by the technology. Whereas Dullaart instigated the process, the technical machine performs the poem. Yet the execution is at times disrupted by human input. Despite Dullaart’s strict protocol for the ‘armies’ (each consecutive line is logged and validated manually), mistakes happen. For instance, when someone pushes the button twice because a verification is late the same line will appear in two different accounts. Inevitably, also the rhythm and content will change because single lines or whole accounts may be removed once a fake identity is unmasked or when the owners find out that their accounts are used in inappropriate ways. Finally, most users will likely have been puzzled as to what happened because the lines seemed to be anonymous: are the poems idiocy, a critique or praise? The ambiguous use of ‘stealth accounts’ that reflect artificial identities, a signature that may be left behind in the final line of the poem, and the way Dullaart revealed his authorship only afterwards resemble Dadaist tactics where identity and authorship were similarly elusive and misleading. In Phantom Love the technology is tool and content: through the regularity of the stanzas and the irregularity of the sentences and symbols, the formal instruction versus the human-machine randomness, and the abstruse use of identities, infused by sociotechnical networked processes, the poems expand beyond themselves, creating multiple readings and understandings. Whereas idiocy in Dada was often – and certainly in the case of the Baroness – a way of living and a method to act politically in public by performing the seemingly nonsensical and transforming or disrupting the normative, in digital data idiocy returns as an aesthetic

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phenomenon that is engendered and played out through the infrastructure of the web. By undermining the fundamental structures of the platform and subverting the like economy through the practice of commenting, Dullaart manages to create confusion, if only for an ‘Instagram moment’. That these moments don’t last is not lost on Dullaart. The domain name http://www. attention.rip/ and the tag #attentionrip are the preambles for the day the predictable will happen: the accounts will be identified and subsequently shut down. In an attempt to save the precarious aesthetics Dullaart recorded the entries via webrecorder.io where they can be read in full, albeit that the immediate surprise of the sudden encounter (in many accounts one post is liked many times more than others), and thus its tactical appeal, is lost. As he mentions on the home page of attention.rip: ‘[E]ach poem, within its originally emphemeral [sic] publication, sufferes [sic] the entropy of the attention economy.’18 Like the Baroness’s, Dullaart’s poetry alienates in its form, in the context in which it performs, and in how it interweaves the technical with the human and the social. In this sense, Dullaart explores the philosophical, aesthetic and political implications in an even more rigorous and systemic way while raising some important questions. What constitutes poetry in a sociotechnical environment? What are its aims? Where are its borders? How to act out poetry? How to become poetry?

Precarious aesthetics in data On 9 January 2020, Erica Scourti’s work Difficult to Find the Lost Things (2019) was part of the exhibition 24/7 at Somerset House in London (Figure 15.3). The exhibition, curated by Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie, explored the non-stop nature of contemporary life. Scourti’s work is a large drawing comprising doodles and small images, some of them half coloured and overlaid with words and short sentences in different languages. The chaotic jumble turns out to be a digital collage she made on her phone in which she traces fragments from her own online archive. Similar to some of the visual poetry of the Baroness, the paper is used as a performative space in which the boundary between words and images is blurred. On headphones you can hear her reading out in a monotonous and almost lethargic voice the words and sentences, muddled up in English and Greek. The result is a highly dense, layered and chaotic work, which fits the contemporary attention economy, in which data and information circulate in overwhelming, inescapable and never-ending streams. The Greek/English artist has become known for her performative projects based on her online life. Examples include emphasizing the banality of how Google encapsulates personal information in keywords (Life in AdWords, 2012–13), in which she emailed her diary to herself via her Gmail account, and each day read aloud the keywords that Google came up with in front of a webcam; asking a ghostwriter to write her biography based on her online traces in social

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FIGURE 15.3 Erica Scourti, Difficult to Find the Lost Things, 2019, detail. Printed with permission of the artist.

media, email accounts and search history (The Outage, 2014); asking others to participate in her work by either responding to her requests (So Like You, 2014), or collating fragments (from her online archive parsed by algorithms or semi-automated editing systems), or imagining the missing links to create short stories about her life (Dark Archives, 2015); and including snippets of personal exchanges with friends and family into her work which are edited and read randomly by a voice imitation algorithm (Slip Tongue, 2018). The projects are process-led scenarios in which human and computer language intermingle and form a collaborative authorship, and where it is never fully clear who the actor is and what is influenced by whom. Countering the presumed clarity and objective stance of technology, Scourti emphasizes the

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fragmentation, the noise, the non-transparency and the nonsensical that take place in the executions of computer processes. While she has a profound interest in the working and outcomes of algorithms and how they exert power, she always challenges the process with human influence. The results are often semi-fictions or estranged poetry in a hybrid language, being and speaking both Greek and English, coupled with software and its processes, which is performed or visualized in intimate yet satirical ways. Operating in this mix of her own experiences and (digital) memorabilia with abstract computer protocols that are unstable and liable to fail, her performances, similar to Dullaart’s, are inherently – and with time – increasingly precarious. By drawing attention to the opacity and limitations of the media she works with, whether human or non-human, the works can be explored as a precarious mediation of the themes she addresses. In a rhythmic ebb and flow of words, she and her co-workers interweave traces of events, meetings, notes, doodles and personal emotions from laughter to crying, which drift in and out of each other’s purview. Acting out the banal and mundane, in some cases throughout nearly year-long daily performances (Life in Adwords, 2012–13), her endurance and stoic reading of the words provides them with an emotional and poetic quality that is both fun, ironic and subversive. Using her private everyday self as a site for artistic experimentation and expression, like the Baroness, she takes pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, whether it is of language and fiction or body and identity. While never really being sure where the artistic and the private life begin or end – as she mentions, ‘As human and algorithmic witnesses become ever more entangled, the subject that emerges . . . is not only casting a digital shadow, but becomes inextricable from it’19 – Scourti’s semi-autobiographical poetic gestures can quickly become compulsive in the endless self-branding of social media. This is not only true for herself, but also for her friends and family whose personal exchanges can become part of her work. It could be argued that these tactics merely play into the mechanisms of neoliberal economics and thus reinforce the power dynamics at play. While being very aware of these implications, Scourti – and Dullaart, for that matter – show how an intensive scrutiny of the different roles and applying tactics of exaggeration and extreme appropriation compliance to rules can empower. Rather than merely being random or chaotic, her method is a tactic: she disrupts in the sea of data and by using the technical translations and filling the gaps with fiction, fragments of videos, photos or drawings, she enacts a precarious aesthetics in which she elides the distinctions between offline and online, private and public, fact and fiction. Similar to Dullaart, Scourti emphasizes the sociopolitical implications of personal data being filtered, tracked and managed by confronting the performativity of algorithms, bots and other automated software. By exposing the mundane in a playful, visual way, both artists encourage users to be more poetic, to disrupt, misuse and intervene in computational processes in order to take back control. Addressing and exploiting the

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opaqueness of computer bots and algorithms, the precarious economic systems that underlie many social media platforms, and the resulting fragmentation, noise and fleeting experience, create unstable and uncertain outcomes. Yet, being fully aware of the consequences, the artists don’t merely employ but strategically use the precarious data aesthetic. Their tactics are connected to linguistic methods, and moreover, the intentions of the Baroness. Similar to her, Dullaart and Scourti refuse to compromise and challenge their peers, readers and existing online social media norms. The paradigm of tactical media as being ‘artfulness in creating chaos and the ability to do so with a synthesis of autonomy, pointed humour, and clever storytelling’20 is clearly visible in the works discussed, from the Baroness until today. While the use of fiction, trickery and hoaxes is now mostly charged with negative connotations, tactical media art shows that even in the nonsensical swathe of data there is a place for art that disrupts. Taking advantage of invisibility, loss and gaps, tactical media infiltrates and subverts the everyday and becomes a systemic critique which enables seeing things anew by disrupting the routine of online experiences. Serpentine air currents are replaced by fibre optics, yet the word still penetrates.

Notes 1 David Garcia, ‘Dark Jesters Hiding in Plain Sight: Hoaxes, Hacks, Pranks, and Polymorphic Simulations’, in J. K. Shaw and T. Reeves-Evision, eds, Fiction as Method (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 73–102, here p. 75. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol.1, trans. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 40. 3 Garcia, ‘Dark Jesters Hiding in Plain Sight’, 77. 4 ‘She Wore Men’s Clothes’, The New York Times, 17 September 1910, p. 6. 5 The Baroness was born as Else Hildegard Plötz in Germany on 12 July 1874. She named herself Baroness after she married the German Baron von FreytagLoringhoven in 1913. She is best known for her poetry published in The Little Review. 6 Linda Lappin, ‘Dada Queen in the Bad Boys’ Club: Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven’, Southwest Review 89:2/3 (2004): 307–19. 7 Ibid., n.p. 8 Amelia Jones, ‘ “Women” in Dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie’, in N. SawelsonGorse, ed., Women in DADA. Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1998), 142–73, here pp. 142–3. 9 The poem was written around the mid-1920s, but only published posthumously in Sulfur (1983). 10 ‘Flapper’ is the word used to describe the young and modern female subculture in America of the 1920s who were known for their energetic freedom, short skirts and hair dresses, and by embracing an exorbitant and outgoing lifestyle they flaunted their disdain for what was then considered

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acceptable behaviour. Kelly Boyer Sagert, Flappers. A Guide to an American Subculture (Santa Barbara: Greenwoord Press, 2010. 11 Paul Crumbley, Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997). 12 Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, Body Sweats. The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2011), 12. 13 Orgasmic toast is the title of one of her poems, and an ironic tribute to the popularity of the toaster in the 1920s as a symbol of technical innovation and American consumer culture. Gammel and Zelazo, Body Sweats, 347. 14 Ibid., 11. 15 Gammel and Zelazo reprinted some of the reviews and discussions about the Baroness’s work that were published in The Little Review. See Body Sweats, 327–32. 16 While his name, Constant Dullaart, is not merely a portmanteau (i.e. ‘constantdull-art’), he managed to bring dullness to the next level. Whereas Dada felt the world was becoming dull, too routine and needed shaking up, which they did by challenging their audience, Dullaart embraces and enacts the Dull with a performative act in the form of a real-world start-up DullTech™. 17 The project is based on two earlier projects in which he created and used fictitious identities and social media accounts: High Retention, Slow Delivery (2014) where he exposed the influence of the ‘like economy’, and The Possibility of an Army (2016) in which he confronted the concept of digital identity. 18 http://attention.rip/. 19 Erica Scourti, ‘Profiles of You’, in Shaw and Reeves-Evision, eds, Fiction as Method, 121–79, here p. 161. 20 Mary Weppler, ‘The Archetype of the Trickster Examined through the Readymade Art of Marcel Duchamp’, The International Journal of Arts Theory and History 13:4 (2018): 11–21.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Multiple Narratives of Post-Truth Politics, Told Through Pictures Jack Southern

In Western culture today we are incessantly presented with an abundance of divergent political narratives, portrayed through an unprecedented volume of images, experienced at an unrelenting pace. As the conditions of our posttruth era continue to allow emotional interoperation to win over veracity, binary narratives thrive in the refuge of their own filter bubbles and echo chambers. We can identify prominent forms of right-wing populism, which ensure that quests for rationality and truth are consistently outmanoeuvred – cast aside as needless, over-sincere and time-consuming pursuits. Advocates of a veracity of information are accused of seeking to reimpose the values of the political class and economic elite, which such forms of populism claim to aim to overthrow. Within this context, we are challenged to constantly question the multiple, fragmented and often conflicting political narratives to which we are exposed through pictures. This essay seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary modes of image production and dissemination, the construction of political picture narratives, and the role and nature of our understanding of veracity today. Structured around two central arguments, this discussion will first reflect on the consequences of a distinct lack of online responsibility and accountability within the development of big tech in recent years. This will focus on the absence of robust regulation within global social media platforms, specifically in relation to image-orientated political messaging. Key to consider is the extent to which this has been seized and capitalized upon by right-wing groups and populist political figures, across 292

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both Europe and the US. It can be argued that a profound disruption and manipulation of Western political narratives has served to benefit the advancement of populist and right-wing political ideals and structures of power. Ultimately, this questions the role that a disregard for veracity has played in the erosion of trust in our Western democratic systems. The second prominent area this essay seeks to address is the role of creative practitioners in response to the context described above. Artists and activists, as makers of images, can play a critical role in countering the dominance of right-wing political narratives, with a distinct ability to contest the conditions defining our post-truth era. This is to consider the importance of both conceptual and philosophical interoperations of the role of creative image-makers, but crucially to also focus on pragmatic practical considerations. Thus, I will be examining what today’s modes of digital intervention and resistance might actually look like. Furthermore, I will explore how strategies and tactics developed by artists could emerge as shared and transferable, with the potential to enact broader cultural and societal change. I will propose a methodology to navigate through the multiple narratives we are continually exposed to, through offering ways to decipher authentic, moral, ethical and rational debates, in among the easily digestible persuasion of high impact images. Key to the broader critique, as well as central in the discussion of both of these two main areas of focus, is to examine the role and nature of the digital architectures we inhabit, specifically in relation to issues of digital (in)equality and (in)justice. Issues increasingly scrutinized in recent years through the prominent critical media theory of writers such as Cathy O’Neil1, Virginia Eubanks2 and Safiya Umoja Noble.3 Exploring the role of emerging technologies in relation to the potential for proactive and effective creative responses illuminates artistic practices which share common aims of countering the dominance of big tech – critically questioning the role of the complicity of commercially run global platforms, in the polarizing of political narratives, as well as the subsequent facilitation and dissemination of right-wing views and attitudes. In many cases, this reveals the relationship between the unseen (and hidden) practices of digital injustice and discrimination, such as algorithmic bias, and the very much seen (and felt) cultural and societal inequalities, which in many ways define our times. Ultimately this essay seeks to ask vital questions about how we might understand the range of narratives of images we are exposed to online, while also considering our own personal positions, roles and responsibilities as both individual and collective narrative and truth-makers, as well as guardians of those truths. As already touched upon, the extremities of our current moment prompt us to question the political narratives we are exposed to more than ever – but more importantly, to also question our ability to challenge the authority and motivations of both big tech and the mainstream media, in assuming the right to determine the narrative of images we are offered to consume. Both arguably preside over an ultimate

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ability to limit or expand our knowledge, understanding and experience of the world. Who better to push back, to ask these questions, make these challenges, and offer means by which to address and act on them, than creative visual practitioners?

Context – a sea of images compete for our attention Every day a sea of images compete for attention in a fierce and ruthless image hierarchy. This has contributed to an environment in which the relationship to veracity as experienced through images has become an ever increasingly complex one. Many of the images experienced digitally and online exist within a composite network of multiple and divergent image economies, with equally tortuous associated structures of distribution and dissemination. Navigating the sheer volume and range of images we are exposed to, while also considering their constantly conflicting agendas, means we find ourselves at the centre of an insurmountable struggle to understand the multiple narratives we experience through pictures. While we might have previously assumed that the vast availability of images and information online would result in us seeing more clearly, we have in fact discovered the opposite to be true. As we grapple with image overload, notions of originality, truth and knowledge all seem to become more distant and distorted, with every further image we are exposed to. As James Bridle points out: ‘The more images we see, the less we know. The result is fear, confusion, and often anger – the dominant tenor of our present politics.’4 The relationship between hierarchies of images and sociopolitical structures of power forms the centre of Hito Steyerl’s research. The German academic, writer and artist has written and lectured extensively about the nature of the contemporary image-dominated reality. In a 2013 lecture at the Photographic Universe and Political Agency conference, Steyerl stated that ‘images are not objective or subjective renditions of reality, of pre-existing conditions – but they are rather nodes of energy and matter, which migrate across different supports – which shape and effect people, landscapes, social systems, and whole political systems’.5 Here Steyerl describes our contemporary post-truth experience, as one in which images fluidly travel as mobile fragments of data which are constantly being reordered and reconfigured. We realize that images can, of course, be configured to be seen – to tell a particular story, to portray a particular narrative. But they can also be reconfigured to not be seen, or indeed to distort or obscure, making narrative threads we may attempt to follow through pictures impossible to decipher. History tells us that strategies of distortion, deflection and misrepresentation are among the most powerful tactics of any populist movement.6 When we

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consider the operational modes of right-wing populism today, we can quickly recognize key characteristics of our post-truth environment, which have facilitated and enabled populist picture narratives to thrive. We know that many political memes are made to demand and assume our attention. But more importantly, we also know that in many cases they act to purposefully mislead, deceiving and misdirecting us from truth. An extreme surge in rogue material coming from a myriad of sources and positions produced for political purposes can very effectively complicate our understanding of the relationship between the picture narratives we experience and notions of veracity and truth. We might reasonably therefore summarize that the conditions which Steyerl refers to as our image-dominated reality and those of a surveillance capitalist logic which ensures our constant and consistent online activity have collided with our post-truth experience, to catalyse the power agendas of right-wing populist politics. 7

Images prioritizing impact over veracity This analysis is certainly affirmed and re-enforced when we consider the overarching political conditions of recent years in the US, as well as certain European counties such as the UK. Binary and protectionist political environments have given rise to some of the most assurgent populist movements and figures of this century. These conditions have also arguably facilitated two of the most profound Western political earthquakes of our times. The election of President Trump in the US, and the Brexit vote in the UK, which both took place in 2016. It is important to recognize that at the heart of the success of both the Trump and Vote Leave campaigns were not written words, nor lengthy nuanced or convincing texts, nor articles addressing different viewpoints or balanced arguments. At the heart of the success of both campaigns was the immediate sway of emotionally driven narratives, portrayed through pictures. Narratives fuelled by attention-grabbing images, often presented through the most covert, complex and deviant means. Images predominantly prioritizing impact over veracity.8 Political propaganda presented as memes with the ability to go viral instantly, aided by algorithms which favour images and videos, over text posts or links to credible news articles. Of the Trump campaign, American far-right political activist and notorious internet troll, Charles Carlisle Johnson,9 was famously quoted as saying, ‘[W]e memed the president into existence.’10

Images, digital data breach and (in)justice To discuss the circumstances which led to these political paradigm shifts in any great detail would be another essay entirely. But in order to further

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qualify suggestions made around the role image narratives played in their conception, as well as to underline the central argument of this part of the essay, I will briefly refer to two very specific and significant elements of these political campaigns. First is the nature and scale of the data breach which was central to both. Secondly, and perhaps even more significantly, is the construction of picture narratives through tailored material made in-house specifically for the respective campaigns by the data analytics companies they employed. These two elements both orientate around a now widely acknowledged post-truth reality, in which we know that mainstream political campaigns have the potential to work with largely unknown tech start-up companies, in unregulated ways and through manipulative means. The role of data analytics tech start-ups, as well as the nature and scale of the data breach of both campaigns, was first illuminated through the media coverage of the activities of Cambridge Analytica (initially through the Observer and Guardian newspapers in the UK, and the New York Times in the US).11 This was principally related to their involvement in the US presidential elections, but additionally in the work carried out on the Vote Leave campaign by Canadian company AggregateIQ, during the UK’s EU referendum. Equally well documented are the roles and motivations of the various companies already mentioned, as well as individual actors such as Dr Aleksandr Kogan, Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer – to name just a few who played a major role in the initial data breach, as well as being central to the overall success of both campaigns. The methods of data mining and harvesting used to psychologically profile and target individual users by both Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ had been adopted from those developed by big tech and a surveillance capitalist logic which has infiltrated every aspect of our online experience. This has proved without any doubt that this economic logic, developed to direct web-based consumer interactivity, has seamlessly transitioned from the commercial into the political arena – in doing so, seizing the ability to affect the political choices we make, and in turn the ability to profoundly manipulate our democratic processes. But of most significance in relation to issues of digital injustice is the volume of data that was unknowingly extracted via Facebook (in the case of the Trump campaign, this was as many as 87 million profiles), as well as how that data was then used in the micro targeting process. As already suggested, the role of images in the construction of cogent political narratives was crucial to both campaigns. This is why Cambridge Analytica did not only micro target individuals with material that already existed online, or even material they commissioned to be made. Rather they used material they produced themselves in-house for mass dissemination.12 So in addition to employing data scientists, psychologists and strategists, they also had an entire team of creatives, designers, videographers and photographers, etc. producing their own tailored content of images and videos. The priority of this content was to persuade people towards the

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cause at any cost, with truth and veracity of information of little or no significance. This approach is one learnt, appropriated and upscaled from a bedroom-and-basement industry which has emerged out of the US, now rampant worldwide. It is possible to make a considerable amount of money generating fake political news and meme content on a basic home computer, which can then be disseminated through fake social media accounts, predominantly funded through right-wing political groups.

New era of the collective coherence of the far-right This is both continuous with history and reflective of current tactics employed by the far-right across the US and Europe. Many studies into how misinformation is both generated and spread reveal that those with rightwing views are far more likely to share unverified and fake information than people of a left-wing leaning. For example, a comprehensive study undertaken by the Online Civic Culture Centre in the UK found that ‘Conservative supporters and social media users with right-wing ideological beliefs, were more likely to spread news they knew to be fake, while Labour supporters and left-wingers were more likely to try to correct it’.13 14 The ability of right-wing organizations to generate and share material which has no basis in fact or truth was, of course, not new when the revelations around data breach and political micro targeting were first revealed through the Cambridge Analytica scandals. But what both the Trump and Vote Leave campaigns did demonstrate was the transitioning into the dawn of a new era, which perhaps no one outside of the companies involved saw coming. This new era has awoken us to the ability of previously fragmented and marginal right-wing groups to unite. Through bringing networks together, rebranding and renaming existing social media accounts where necessary, far-right groups have been able to mobilize under singular cohesive and unified large-scale campaigns. As we have experienced increasingly intensely over the last three to four years, this has in turn led to a more widespread tolerance and legitimizing of right-wing opinions and values, both in the political sphere and wider society at large. The small-scale, low-impact and fragmentary nature of right-wing groups has in the past always been a major challenge to their potential momentum and societal impact. The far-right has recognized that the way social media works mimics the key tactics and methodologies of populism, enabling unelected political narrators to speak and appeal directly to the people (the social media users), shunning establishment politics at every possible opportunity. Prominent far-right figures, with the support of very wealthy business people (such as

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Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer), have now found a very effective set of strategies to overcome the previous problems presented by the dilution and dispersal of their central message.15 We are now in a new era of the collective coherence of the far-right.

The response of artists and activists Through its rich and varied contributions, Dada Data recognizes the arc of history from the early twentieth century through to the present, considering a broad range of forms of cultural and artistic representation. Cumulatively these illuminate that the countercultural strategies of the Dada movement have been adopted by a range of avant-garde and subcultural movements, before more recently being employed by far-right groups and populist narrators. Considering that these strategies were originally artistic responses to the aggression, nationalism and rising fascism of the time, it seems appropriate to envisage the further trajectory of this arc as one in which contemporary artists and activists could reclaim such strategies, in order to resist and contest the binary and polarizing conditions defined by the populist politics of our post-truth era. As suggested in the introduction to this essay, here we look to countercultural movements led by creative practitioners addressing some of the most defining inequalities of our times – practitioners challenging where and how the digital architectures we inhabit facilitate and perpetuate bias and injustice. Artists thinking both critically and responsively about our relationship to emerging technologies offer new critical models of working, as well as progressive frameworks of thinking, which in turn create access points to nuanced and diverse discourses. Contemporary practitioners such as Stephanie Dinkins and Joy Buolamwini, who work both transversely and subversively with new media, do believe in the emancipatory, empowering and democratizing capacities of the digital environments we traverse. But equally they feel it is vitally important to challenge the assumptions these technologies impose upon us. When we consider not only the major Facebook data and privacy breeches already discussed, but also the current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 5G infrastructures as we move towards the smart home and the smart city, it couldn’t be a more pertinent time for artists to be asking who runs our digital ecosystem, who it is serving, who it is able to represent, and crucially, who is invited to participate and help shape its future.

Diversity, equality and digital (in)justice Examining the work of Stephanie Dinkins and Joy Buolamwini reveals that such questions are central to their respective practices. Both share interests

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and motivations in ensuring technological advance can both involve and represent as broad a spectrum of people as possible, and be as ethnically diverse as the societies within which we live. Both practitioners principally address such issues through prioritizing the importance of intervening into the way machine learning, data sets and algorithmic processes are being developed. This is to recognize, at this important juncture, that one of the biggest challenges we face is to ensure that pre-existing human biases do not seamlessly transition into the digital sphere, resulting in exclusionary and discriminatory experiences for so many. In discussing the importance of ensuring that the largely invisible practices of digital injustice are not hard-wired into the new technologies of the future, it is crucial to acknowledge that, for more than thirty years, the world of coding has been dominated by well-educated white males. It is essential for this to be constantly contested and re-evaluated, and for the tech sector as a whole to address why so many women, and people from non-white demographics, are so desperately under-represented. According to Google’s most recent Annual Diversity Report, despite some improvements in recent years, 68 per cent of Google’s tech workforce remains male, and less than 4 per cent are black.16 Within this context, it is reassuring to learn that some of the most prominent artists and thinkers alert to how our future is being encoded are non-male, people of colour – people often drawing on their own personal experiences of prejudice in order to develop effective critical and creative responses. Looking more closely at the work of self-proclaimed Poet of Code, Ghanaian-American computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini, reveals that probing questions about the future of coding is central to her work as founder of the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL). Similarly to organizations such as Black Girls Code,17 AJL proposes a new inclusive encoding movement, which Buolamwini refers to as ‘in-coding’. Through positioning social change as a central priority in the making and testing of data sets, practices of in-coding ensure full-spectrum teams are responsible for monitoring co-workers’ inconsistencies and blind spots. Buolamwini believes inclusive training sets have the potential to unlock immense levels of digital equality, as the foundations for making ‘algorithms that represent the fair and equal societies we want for the future’.18 The work of US-based artist and researcher Stephanie Dinkins specifically draws our attention to marginalized groups and communities disproportionately impacted by data-centric technologies. Described by Dinkins, the work acts as a vehicle for developing ‘platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence, as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories’.19 In practice, her work asks us to deeply consider how we as citizens can best understand and shape our relationship to big data, and the digital environments created by big tech. In doing so, Dinkins focuses on grassroots strategies for technological intervention and resistance, which in distinction to the work of Buolamwini (which is rooted in software and coding innovation), uniquely develops from very personal experiences and human interactions.

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Through projects such as AI.Assembly and the ongoing Project alKhwarizmi (PAK), Dinkins has developed a community engagement model in order to facilitate discussion and exchange around key issues of digital injustice. Workshops within her local community in Brooklyn, New York, for example, focus on empowering a proactive and questioning level of understanding about how the complexities of computational systems work, and crucially how these effect people’s day-to-day lives. Often this vital knowledge-sharing leads to proactive application, as, similarly to the aspirations of some of Buolamwini’s projects, workshops often result in the collaborative designing of new models of inclusive data sets. Through developing data sets in an autonomous and independent capacity, we can recognize that both Dinkins and Buolamwini are primarily focused on countering the dominance of the algorithmic processes developed and controlled by big tech. In doing so these practitioners contest the binary and polarizing way in which online narratives are presented to us, offering a potential path towards experiencing both online information and image narratives outside of overtly financialized structures, instead guided by the moral and ethical frameworks inherent in striving towards digital equality. As discussed, much of the work of both Dinkins and Buolamwini addresses the largely invisible practices of computational injustice. Although crucially important and hugely impactful, the ethical coding practices of digital activists often remain largely unseen. It may therefore be important to additionally illuminate ways in which creative practitioners are creating very visible, visual responses to the digital inequalities we face. This is to consider how material and images made by artists can communicate distinctly differently to those we may experience more readily online. In addition, this is to turn our attention towards the potential for artists as innovators to develop independent, visually led networks and online initiatives, re-evaluating how we think about what it means to be part of an online community.

Visually led – alternative models of online communities Independent curator, writer and educator Shama Khanna offers a substantial and rigorous critique in relation to issues of digital inequality and injustice, through long-term research and commissioning project Flatness. The complex remit and expansive scope of both the content and related discourses which Flatness encompasses are visually and aesthetically prioritized through the unique visual format of the online platform. These qualities are defined by its autonomous nature and structure. The content of the site centres the visual sensibilities of artists’ moving-image practices through its continuous presentation of new works, as well as related material

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and texts by invited contributors. Content on the site is also developed through the invitation of guest curators, which underlines its ability and aspiration to develop networked cultures which have the potential to build new kinds of online communities. This is further emphasized through the interactive elements of the platform, such as the calendar and comments feeds – coupled with open access, no log ins or requirements to make payments in order to view works. This encourages an active exchange from a community built around, and in support of, the critical and social contextualization of the work showcased. In emphasizing the priorities of interactivity, and the building of new online networks and communities, Flatness encourages us to see the potential of independent and autonomous forms of connectivity, within which issues of diversity and equality are both fundamental and embedded. Khanna’s Flatness project demonstrates a distinct resolve to reflect on the challenges Western societies currently face as a result of the ‘objectifications of racism, sexism and capitalism’, and the extent to which this turns ‘people of colour, those who identify as women, and workers into things and commodities’.20 As similarly evident in the work of Buolamwini and Dinkins, Flatness is positioned within a framework of critique which aims to challenge the wellestablished monopolization of exploitative forms of technological development by the white corporate elite (Figure 16.1). With these guiding principles both firmly established and understood, we can turn our attention to the potential of what the Flatness model could offer: how might it be both adopted and progressed? Quickly we can envisage how Flatness could be developed into alternative forms of social media networking. In fact, in an interview with art critic and editor Henry Broome, Khanna refers to this ongoing project as a ‘mouldable alternative’ to the ‘extractive and manipulative’21 business models of commercially run social media services. Through paying close attention to the critical framing of the Flatness project, we are reminded that any social media service run and controlled by global tech companies such as Google and Facebook (or indeed new services such as Vero or MeWe),22 have the potential to expose their users to multiple forms of data breach, as extensively discussed in the earlier stages of this essay. Crucially, Khanna additionally prompts us to remember that, through the prioritizing of both data harvesting and data surveillance in order to meet their corporate and capital accumulation demands, commercially driven services fundamentally exist to both conform to and serve the aggressive market economies of late capitalism. As such, they are embedded within the structures and priorities of a neoliberal tech agenda which, as we are now fully aware, has grave consequences as a result of the dramatic scaling and expansion of prominent platforms, coupled with a distinct lack of online monitoring and regulation. Catalysed by the rampant acceleration of a prevalent disruptor culture which has migrated across our economic, social and political arenas, we

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FIGURE 16.1 Flatness screengrab Feb 2019, showing artwork by Nikhil Vettukattil. © Shama Khanna, 2021. Image courtesy of  flatness.eu, and reproduced with the permission of Shama Khanna.

have seen such consequences include the polarization of viewpoints and entrenchment of binary arguments, which has led to the demonizing of minorities and those with opposing views. These trends, coupled with the extreme digital injustices previously discussed, should indicate to us that many of the issues we are currently encountering in the Western world are synonymous with, or at least analogized by, our relationship to and dependence upon commercially driven social media services. This leads us to

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reasonably question whether such platforms are able to communicate and share the ideas of a potentially dramatically different future. We might ask whether platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have the capacity or capabilities to deliver future thinking, facilitated through a revised approach to our digital architectures. Do they have the ability to be become advocates for a digital ecosystem which ensures new models of knowledge sharing, centring revised moral and ethical frameworks which assume a rigorous relationship to veracity? As suggested throughout this essay, in order to address such questions we again turn towards the innovations of creative practitioners, and by doing so we reach a final but crucially important point of discussion. Creative practices discussed throughout this essay seem to share a quality and emphasis which commercially driven platforms seem unable to substantially address and prioritize. This is to understand that our experiences on- and offline should not be portrayed as distant and disjointed, but in fact as intrinsically linked. Platforms of the future need to promote the important message that how we behave and interact online has very tangible moral, social and physical consequences within our offline existence. In reflecting on the political period of 2016 to the present this message could not be more pertinent when considering the direct correlation we have seen between the rise in online/virtual abuse, and verbal and physical attacks on our streets.

New models, supported by appropriate funding mechanisms As contemporary artists and activists constantly develop new and unique creative ways of working within the digital architectures we traverse, are we now beginning to see the emergence of genuine alternatives – a possible antidote to the proliferation of platforms which prioritize instant consumption and reaction over sustained thinking, reflection and the progressive sharing of ideas? If so, then the next step might be to further realize the potential for creative practitioners to coalesce around new models of online communities, which seek to replace the divisive disregard for truth, characterized by our post-factual era. This is to reinstate the authorities of veracity, sincerity and authenticity, coupled with values of social, cultural consciousness and justice. A model of engagement which renders the rightwing populist distortions of multiple narrative creation obsolete, in favour of a clarity of vision, of a strong and central narrative which can be believed in, invested in and built upon. This essay has continually discussed ways in which the development of commercially driven social media services, and the subsequent picture narratives they promote, have been capitalized upon by right-wing political groups and campaigns, leading to an ultimate threat to our Western

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democratic systems. The two central critical framings of the essay have orientated around, first, the role of the capitalist structures and economic imperatives which mainstream digital platforms are embedded within; and secondly, a questioning of the role of the state and governments in developing an appropriate level of regulation in response to the expediential growth and influence of such platforms. Through writing this essay, I have discovered that these questions now need to be extended beyond the role governments might take in assuming a greater level of accountability in order to protect citizens, as well as the vital voice which our democracies afford them. These questions need to be addressed through national and state-wide campaigns to encourage the social consciousness away from commercially driven platforms which, as much discussed, both derive from and are wedded to the modus operandi of big tech, incorporating the failings of both late capitalism and neoliberal agendas. A sudden and abrupt call for citizens to not use commercially driven social media platforms, such as campaigns we have increasingly seen in recent years encouraging people to delete their Facebook accounts, will not work. The structures of such platforms are simply too embedded into our lives, due to the fact that they derive from an economic model which has evolved into a surveillance capitalist logic, infiltrating almost every aspect of our online lives. Therefore, we first need to address and erode these economic structures, along with the social, cultural and political perimeters which such platforms have so forcefully co-opted people to adopt. Only by addressing these broader issues will we truly be able to understand what makes it so difficult for people to ‘opt out’ of platforms such as Facebook, and in turn to best understand how to offer a supportive structure in order to allow them to do so. Mental health support should be a priority, in relation to the detrimental cognitive and psychological effect that dependence on such platforms has led to, which has been so dramatically overlooked by big tech. The severity of these issues means a structure of state support needs to go far beyond governments attempting to retrospectively regulate how platforms function. We need to call for a state- and government-led campaign and support package over a number of years, which enables citizens to move away from social media services run by big tech, instead embracing well-regulated, new and emergent equivalents, which can offer the vital online communities needed by so many, particularly those in disadvantaged and vulnerable positions – but through networks with different priorities, as well as appropriate means and funding models. These platforms can therefore function without the hidden and encrypted deviances of commercial platforms, which overwhelmingly value the monetization of our predictive data over the importance and potential of human relations, connection and sense of community. As demonstrated by this essay, creatives can be a vital driving force in a new online consciousness, with the ultimate aim of an ethical digital revolution. States and governments across the Western world should help, fund and support them to do so.

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Notes 1 Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown Publishing, 2016) discusses the societal impacts of big data algorithmic processes, particularly highlighting how these reinforce pre-existing inequalities. 2 Virginia Eubank’s Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2018) addresses and extends arguments established by O’Neil, through examining the role algorithms and automation play in the development of new governmental systems which perpetuate economic injustice and poverty. These include modes of economic suppression within the privatization of public services, as well as in judicial and legal cases in the US. 3 Co-founder and Co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018) looks specifically as the Google search engine, and the political implications of biased structures embedded in its search patterns and results. Noble challenges the idea of the internet being a fully democratic or post-racial environment. As noted by Emily Drabinski, the critique of Google’s search engines, as explored by Noble, can be applied to many other aspects of the digital infrastructures we frequently inhabit. In Drabinski’s words, ‘What emerges from these pages is the sense that Google’s algorithms of oppression comprise just one of the hidden infrastructures that govern our daily lives, and that the others are likely just as hard-coded with white supremacy and misogyny as the one that Noble explores’ (‘Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 February 2018, para 12, https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/ideologies-of-boring-things-the-internet-andinfrastructures-of-race/ (02.04.2019). 4 James Bridle, New Ways of Seeing, ‘Machine Visions’, BBC Radio 4, 24 April 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004f3h. 5 Hito Styerl (in conversation with Victoria Hattam), ‘The Photographic Universe and Political Agency conference’, The New School – Parsons New York, 10 April 2013, https://player.vimeo.com/video/64842531 (13.12.2019). 6 A comparative analysis of the key populist assertions of recent years, with the rise of far-right movements and leaders across Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s, illuminates echoing populist tactics of misrepresentation and manipulation through disinformation. This can be seen in the rise of the fascist movements between the World Wars, such as those of the Blackshirts in Italy and the Nazis in Germany, which culminated in the dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler, respectively. Both were strongly nationalist movements, playing on people’s fears and resentments about the crippled economic situation in Europe, in order to create scapegoats through prejudice and othering. This was a means to justify the silencing of opposition. In both cases, pseudodemocratic support (popularism) was based on myths dispersed through the media, progressively synthesized to espouse only one truth, personified by their respective leaders and cohorts. These dictatorships then assumed the ultimate

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validation to exercise total control, and take military action against all foreign enemies. The success and dominance of this model of conflict (fuelled by disinformation) catalysed and influenced similar movements, such as the nationalist and anti-communist movements of Austria (where Engelbert Dollfuss installed himself as a fascist dictator), António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo regime in Portugal, Finland’s Lapau Movement, the Ustasha movement of the Greater Croatia ideals. Through these historical examples of right-wing dictatorships, we can clearly identify current populism as a phenomenon consistent across cycles of history and contemptuous right-wing political ideologies: recognizing the same psychological tools, reinforced through consistent and repeated messaging; strategies and tactics of cultural coercion and mass control, with the ultimate objective of challenging traditional or pre-established structures of power. 7 ‘Surveillance Capitalist Logic’ is a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff in her recent publication, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). 8 One of the most notable examples would be a poster image unveiled in the UK by Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party in June 2016, in association with the Leave Campaign, which preceded the EU referendum. Breaking Point presented on a series of billboards was reported to the police by Dave Prentis of trade union Unison, complaining that it incited racial hatred and breached UK race laws. This poster, understood as political propaganda, clearly insinuated an imminent threat of an influx of economic migrants into the UK (particularly in reference to the potential of Turkey joining the EU). The image was both divisive and inaccurate in its portrayal of a completely unverified and exaggerated potential increase in migratory numbers. But more importantly, it specifically demonized people of colour, through its depiction of a non-white demographic and through the use of an unrelated image taken out of its original context. The photograph used was of migrants crossing the Croatia–Slovenia border in 2015, with the only prominent person of Caucasian origin obscured by a text box. Dave Prentis, quoted in the Guardian newspaper, said of the poster, ‘This is scaremongering in its most extreme and vile form. Leave campaigners have descended into the gutter with their latest attempt to frighten working people into voting to leave the EU.’ Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, ‘Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant poster reported to police’, The Guardian Online, 16 June 2016, para 2, https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukipbreaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants (19.07.2018). 9 Charles Carlisle Johnson is believed to have instigated the connection between Julian Assange/Wikileaks and the Trump campaign with his 2016 article on GotNews (online) about the impending launch of an anti-Trump website called PutinTrump.org. 10 Stephanie Mencimer, ‘The Left Can’t Meme: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors’ (quoting Johnson), Mother Jones, 2 April 2019, para 3, https://www.motherjones.com/ politics/2019/04/right-wing-groups-are-training-young-conservatives-to-winthe-next-meme-war/ (28.02.2020).

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11 The activities of Cambridge Analytica have been widely reported (particularly by The Guardian) since an interview with whistleblower and ex-employee Christopher Wylie was simultaneously published on the same day, 17 March 2018, in both the Observer in the UK and the New York Times in the US. 12 In July 2018, after substantial media and political pressure, Facebook provided the UK Parliament (Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee) with the digital material used in the micro targeting process during the EU referendum campaign. This had been requested by the British Parliament as part of its enquiry into fake news and the impact of online disinformation on democratic processes. This included nearly 1,600 advertisements and over 130 artworks (seen more than 169 million times overall) made by Cambridge Analytica (SCL Group), disseminated through AggregateIQ’s tailor-made software. Various Brexit campaign groups (including BeLeave, Brexit Central and DUP Vote Leave) cumulatively paid these two companies £3.5 million to make and distribute this material via Facebook. A significant proportion of the specifically made graphics, imagery, text and slogans focused on issues relating to immigration. Much of this disinformation claimed the UK was paying countries such as Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro and Turkey to join the European Union, and, as members, these countries’ citizens would flock to live and work in the UK, gaining open access to the UK’s services, healthcare, jobs and financial support. 13 This study was undertaken by Loughborough University’s Online Civic Culture Centre (OCCC) in July 2018, led by its director, Professor Andrew Chadwick. 14 Andrew Woodcock, ‘Nearly half of social media users who share articles have passed on fake news’, The Independent, 10 May 2019, https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fake-news-facebook-twitter-sharemisinformation-survey-a8908361.html (02.04.2020). 15 Cambridge Analytica secured a £15-million investment from US billionaire and computer scientist Robert Mercer while working on the US presidential election campaign. 16 Google Annual Diversity Report 2020, https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/fi les/25badfc6b6d1b33f3b87372ff7545d79261520d821e6ee9a82c4ab2de42a0 1216be2156bc5a60ae 3337ffe7176d90b8b2b3000891ac6e516a650ecebf0e3f866 (23.02.2020). 17 Black Girls Code is a New York- and Oakland-based non-profit organization providing technology education for African-American young women. 18 Joy Buolamwini in Ted talk, ‘How I’m fighting bias in algorithms’, 16 November 2016, https://www.ajlunited.org (10.11.2020). 19 Stephanie Dinkins (artist’s own website), ‘Biography’ section, para 1, https:// www.stephaniedinkins.com (05.01.2021). 20 Shama Khanna, ‘About’ section, Flatness website, n.d., para 6, https://flatness. euhttps://flatness.eu (23.01.2021). 21 Shama Khanna, extended version of an interview with Henry Broome originally published by Spike Art Magazine, Flatness website, n.d., para 5, https://flatness.eu/uncategorized/interview-with-henry-broome-forspike-art-magazine/ (23.01.2021).

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22 Vero and MeWe are two of many new social sharing platforms illuminated as viable alternatives to the larger, well-known platforms such as Facebook. Both platforms make substantial claims in relation to issues of personal privacy in a post-Cambridge Analytica scandal world. It may be important to point out that Vero and MeWe are both owned and run by individual billionaire corporate executives in pursuit of monopolizing on a new potential marketplace.

INDEX

Page numbers in bold refer to Figures. An ‘n’ following a page number refers to a note – the note number follows the ‘n’ 4chan, 34, 219, 220, 226–7, 231, 255 8chan, 34, 256 A Dozen Cocktails—Please (von Freytag-Loringhoven), 281–5, 282–3 AAH conference, 9 abstraction, 23 commodification, 28 new, 30 as response to World War I, 25–6 absurdity, 52, 165 accelerationism theory, 231, 234–5 acting and performance, 98–9, 99, 100, 101 aestheticization alt-right, 12, 230–42 Retro-Futurism, 231, 233–40, 236, 239 African National Congress, 126 African-American art practice Black Dada Data, 117–9 Black Dada (Pendleton), 115–7, 115 collage, 105–19, 112–4, 113 Afrogeeks, 117–8 After Effects software, 272 agency, 108 AggregateIQ, 296 Alberti, Leon Battista, 207 Algorithmic Justice League, 299 algorithmic regulation, 185 algorithms, 36, 174, 177–8 complexity, 26 as data poems, 26–7, 27 dominance, 300

opaqueness, 290 outcomes, 289 alienation, 91, 192–3 All Your Face Are Belong to Us (Reas), 49–50 Als, Hilton, 109 Alternative für Deutschland, 7 Alternative für Deutschland, 221 alt-right, 5, 8–9, 12 aestheticization, 230–42 art production, 233 artists response, 221–7 authorship, 255 characteristics, 8, 219–20, 232–3 Dadaist element, 251–7 definition, 8 digital collage, 250–7 fascism, 230, 232–3 Germany, 221 globally connected, 8–9 imaginary fascination, 242 jockey randomness, 241 martyrdoms, 238–40, 239 memes, 231, 251 mindset, 1–2 misrepresentation tactics, 305–6n6 Nazi references, 236, 238 online culture, 217–27 origins, 232 origins of term, 219 preppers, 224 profile, 198 Red Pill forum, 223 Retro-Futurism, 231, 233–40, 236, 239 rise of, 106–7 309

310

strategies, 9 tactics, 221, 297–8 targets, 233 terrorism, 235 transgressive humour, 253–5 trolls, 220 vision of subjecthood, 255–6 white self-pity, 226 Alt-Right Complex, The exhibition, 218–9, 226–7 Amazon, 261 ambiguity, 52 Amnesty International, 82 Angelus Novus (Klee), 46, 47 Anglin, Andrew, 233 anti-semitism, 33, 33 Antliff, Mark, 253 Arab Spring uprisings, 78 Archeofuturism, 237 archives and archiving, 165–7, 170, 173–6, 176–7 Arendt, Hannah, 171, 178 Arns, Inke, 12 Arp, Hans, 1, 51, 52 Arp, Jean, 170 art fuel, 52 importance of, 48 potential, 26 relation to information technology, 49 role of, 44 art establishment, gatekeepers, 135 art practice, challenge, 1 artificial intelligence, 11, 194, 199, 207–8, 218, 298, 299 Artificial Soul, 207–8 artistic citizenship, 132 artistic freedom, 31 associative triggers, 173 Atomwaffen Division, 235 attention spans, 242 Australia, 267 colonization, 268 emergence of video art, 269–70 authenticity, 303 authorship, 30, 130, 253–5 automatism, 147 automaton, 204

INDEX

avant-gardism, 41–2, 116 and big data, 46–7 computational practices, 42 ‘Dada Manifesto’ (Ball), 43 ‘Dada Manifesto’ (Tzara), 43–5 datalogical turn, 47–53 demise of, 42, 43–53 identifying marks, 44 self-criticism, 45 avatars, 119 Baader, Johannes, 10, 56, 57–8, 58–60, 63 Bacon, Francis, 192 Ball, Hugo, 1, 26, 43, 52, 126–7, 132, 139, 254, 268 Bandura, Albert, 84, 86 Bannon, Steve, 5, 224, 224–5, 252, 298 Baraka, Amiri, 116 Barbrook, Richard, 197–8 Batarda, Eduardo, 154 Battiss, Walter, 127–8 Bauhaus, 253 BBC, 61 Bearden, Romare, 105, 112, 113 The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, 113–4, 113 Beat poets, 127 Beckermann, Kay, 4 behaviour change, 204 behavioural data, 31 behavioural micro-targeting, 31 beliefs, personal, 1 Benjamin, Walter, 44, 46, 198, 208–9, 230, 242, 269 Benoist, Alain, 39n40 Bereng, Lerato, 125, 129–30 Bergius, Hanne, 3 Bergson, Henri, 127 Berlet, Chip, 240 Berlin Dada, 3, 10, 12, 55–64, 86, 98–9, 129, 248, 249, 253, 268 Dadaist Manifesto, 246 journals, 256 legacy, 55–6 media hoaxes, 55–6, 58–60, 63, 64 political context, 55, 56–8 strategy of theft, 267 Berners-Lee, Tim, 272

INDEX

Bernhard, Hans, 60, 63 Berry, David M., 196n13 Beuys, Joseph, 128 Beyond the Black Atlantic exhibition, 119 biases, 299 Bichlbaum, Andy, 61–2 Biden, Joe, 5 Biegal, Stuart, 63 big data, 36, 46–7, 48, 165 absurdity, 165 archives, 176–7 collective garbage, 177–8 data love, 183–6 formulating connections, 173 Merzbau as, 174–5 psychological forces, 178 big data mining, 11, 183–6 agencies, 185 business, 186–8 cultural philosophy, 190 data love, 188 free-enterprise logic, 191 goals, 188 modes, 187 power relations, 192–4 and privacy, 184 scores, 187 social engineering, 188–92 binary oppositions, 117 Birmingham, Alabama, 113 Biro, Matthew, 10–1, 268 Bishop, Claire, 55, 57 Black, Hannah, 117 Black Consciousness, 128 Black culture, 115–7 Black Dada Data, 117–9 Black Dada (Pendleton), 115–7, 115 Black Lives Matter protests, 5, 106–7, 109, 116, 118, 251–2 Black public spheres, 117–8 Blas, Zach, 217–8 Bobo dolls, 84, 86 Bogerts, Lisa, 12 Bogossian, Skunder, 108 Böhmermann, Jan, 221 Bolsonaro, Jair, 254 Borges, Jorge Luis, 205 Boulle, Catherine, 131–2

311

Bourdieu, Pierre, 187 Breitbart News, 219, 220, 223, 225, 250–1, 252 Breivik, Anders Behring, 222–3 Breton, André, 128 Brexit, 1, 295, 297, 306n8 Bridle, James, 294 Broome, Henry, 301 Brown, Anita, 117 Browne, Simone, 117 Buckland, Daniel, 137–8, 138 bullshit messaging, 69 Buolamwini, Joy, 298, 298–9, 300, 301 bureaucracy, 47 Bürger, Peter, 26, 44, 45, 47, 51 Burroughs, William, 127 Burrows, David, 55 Cabaret Voltaire, 43 Cadwalladr, Carole, 5 Californian ideology, 197–8 Callas, Peter, 269 Cambridge Analytica, 5, 7, 30–1, 37n28, 68n38, 186, 296, 297 Cameron, Andy, 197–8 Casa Pound, 230 Cassirer, Ernst, 193 causality, 173 Center for Historical Reenactments, 131 centralized dictatorships, 136 Chan, Jennifer, 249, 251 Boyfriend, 247, 247, 248, 249 chance, 31, 52, 127, 138, 147 Chans, 17n50 Chauvin, Derek, 41–2 China, 135 Christchurch mosque shooter, 238–40, 239 Christian Nationalism, 125, 137 Chun, Wendy, 173, 175 citizenship, 132 citizen-versus-state logic, 185 civic agency, 146 Civil Rights Act (USA), 112–3 claiming of things, The (Ross), 268, 272–4, 273 clickbait, 177 Clouds, 47, 48, 176–7, 177 Clough, Patricia, 47

312

INDEX

code, 46 Colbert, Stephen, 55, 64n3 collage, 28–30, 29, 34 African-American art practice, 105–19 Black, 112–4, 113 Black Dada Data, 117–9 Black Dada (Pendleton), 115–7, 115 Dada, 109 digital, 12 function, 106–7 Höch, 110–2, 111 strategies, 110–2 three-dimensional. see Merzbau (Schwitters) video, 118 see also digital collage; photomontage collective garbage, 177–8 colonial expropriating protocols, 208 colonialism, 11, 76, 98 colonization, 4, 11, 268, 272 Columbus, Christopher, 208 commodification information, 28 of personal data, 7 communal living spaces, 48 communication, digitization, 184 communication systems, 42 communicative capital, 186–7, 187 communicative importance, 187 compositions, creation, 34 computationalism, 195n13 connectivity, 136, 173, 300–3 consent, ethics of, 7 conspiracy theories, 5, 177 consumerism, 275–6 contemporaneity, 134 Cook, Sarah, 287 copy-and-paste tactic, 274, 276–7 correlations, triumph over causality, 173 counterculture, 9, 298 counter-revolution digital revolution as, 197–209 early modern antecedent, 205–9 Covid-19 pandemic, 7, 172, 199, 200, 203 craft, 51

Craft, Catherine, 174 Crary, Jonathan, 203 creativity, 69, 154 critical discourse, 2 critical perversity, 93 critical thought, 48 Crouch, Colin, 6, 107 crowdsourcing, 261 crowdworkers, 261 cultural citizenship, 132 cultural memory, 12 cultural philosophy, 190 cultural production, 48 culture influencing, 32 reconfiguration, 6 culture wars, 5–6 cunning of reason, 193–4 curation, 170 customer journey mapping, 204 customer service, 190–1 Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (Höch), 28–30, 29, 34, 35 cyber-interference, 136 cybernetics, 47, 174, 209n6 Dada, 127–8 agenda, 177 aims, 1, 43–5 alt-right elements, 253–7 artistic response, 9 authorship, 255 and conceptions of (post-)truth, 4–6 context, 6 data hacks, 27–30 definition, 3, 43 and history, 173–4 ideological underpinnings, 45 resurgence of interest in, 127 strategies, 3–4, 9, 10, 44, 127, 144, 177, 298 tactics, 23–4, 34, 35, 42, 136, 154–5, 281–5, 282–3 transgressive humour, 253–5 understanding, 3–4 vision of subjecthood, 255–6

INDEX

Dada Data (band), 19n68 Dada dolls, 86, 87 Dada identity, 104n18 ‘Dada Manifesto’ (Ball), 43 ‘Dada Manifesto’ (Tzara), 3, 23, 24, 43–5 Dada poems, 26, 51, 281–5, 282–3 Dada Putsch, the, 60 Dada Republic of Berlin-Nikolassee, 3 Dada South?: Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance, Dada legacies in South African art from 1960 to the present exhibition, 125, 129–31, 130, 131, 139 Dadaist Manifesto (Berlin Dada), 246 Dadaist procedure, 31 Dadasourcing (IOCOSE), 261, 262–3 Daily Stormer, 198 D’Aloisio, Nick, 189 Daniels, Jessie, 106–7 Dark Web, 171 data availability, 184 definition, 194n2 expansion of, 47 precarious data aesthetics in, 287–90, 288 strategic use, 30–1 and trash, 173–6, 177–8 data analysis, 186 data analysts, 190 data analytics tech start-ups, 296 data artists, 42, 46 data disaster, 185 data gathering, 184 data hacks, Dada, 27–30 data harvesting, 31, 301 data intermediaries, 188 data logic, 31 data love, 11, 183–6, 188 Data Love conference, 183, 188 data mining, 165, 187, 296 agencies, 185 business, 186–8 cultural philosophy, 190 data love, 188 free-enterprise logic, 191 goals, 188

313

power relations, 192–4 and privacy, 184 scores, 187 social engineering, 188–92 data owners, 187 data poems, algorithms as, 26–7, 27 data points, 177 data politics, 30–2 data scandals, 177 data specialists, 187 data tactics, 34–5 data-driven politics, 6–8 data-driven strategies, 30–2 datalogical turn, 47–53 data-related thematics, 23–4 Davies, William, 136, 139 Davis, Kyla, 137–8, 138 Dawkins, Richard, 39n43, 251 de Grey, Aubrey, 223 de Oliveira, Leonor, 11 De Orellana, Pablo, 254 Debord, Guy, 132 decolonization, 135 defamiliarization, 12–3, 281 deflection, 294–5 dehumanization, 144 Dekker, Annet, 12–3 Deleuze, Gilles, 126, 138 Delgado, Humberto, 148–9 dematerialized art, 52 democracy, 6, 136 Denny, Simon, 223–4 design strategies, 35–6 despair, 153, 153 destabilization, 12–3, 281 dialogical image, 109 DiAngelo, Robin, 105 diaspora aesthetics, 114 Dickerman, Leah, 34, 127 Difficult to Find the Lost Things (Scourti), 287–90, 288 digital architectures, 13, 293 digital collage, 12, 246–57 alt-right, 250–7 authorship, 255 definition, 246–8 media, 248 popularity, 250 technique, 247–9

314

INDEX

transgressive humour, 253–5 vision of subjecthood, 255–6 digital debris, 249 digital dispossession, 7 digital immigrants, 189 digital infrastructures, prevalence, 6 digital injustice, 299, 300 digital natives, 189 digital revolution, as counterrevolution, 197–209 digitization, of society, 6 Dinkins, Stephanie, 298, 299–300, 301 discontinuity, importance of, 9 Discord channels, 234 discursive currency, 1 Disemelo, Katlego, 134 Disnovation.org, 221–2 disruption, 12–3 disruptor culture, 301–2 dissent, 10 distortion, 145–6, 294–5 Dog of Orion (Wa Lehulere), 9–10, 213, 214 dogs of Barcelona, The (Rego), 152–3, 153, 154 Dow Chemical, media hoax, 61 DowEthics.com, 61 Drebusch, Vera, 224 drones, 200 Drucker, Johanna, 54n26 Dubuffet, Jean, 145 Duchamp, Marcel, 99, 135, 253 Dullaart, Constant, 12–3, 289, 290, 291n16 Phantom Love, 285–7 dullness, 291n16 Düsseldorf, 128 Egermann, Florian, 224 Elwes, Jakes, 248 Emcke, Carolin, 34 Emeagwali, Philip, 117 emerging technologies, role of, 293 emotional interoperation, 292 emotions, post-truth politics appeal to, 1–2 emo-truth, 1–2 Enlightenment, the, 11, 117 Enlightenment thinking, 4

Ernst, Max, 145 Ernst, Wolfgang, 175–6 ethical coding practices, 300 ethics of consent, 7 Eurocentric orientation, 116 Everett, Anna, 117–8 extractive logic, 208 eyeball iconography, 77, 78 Facebook, 7, 30–1, 185–6, 187, 223, 298, 303, 304, 307n12, 308n22 FAKA, 134–5, 134 fake news, 4, 107, 126, 177, 272, 297 Farkas, Johan, 4, 6 far-right ideologies, mainstreaming, 31–2 Fascism, 112 fascism, 230, 232–3, 252–3, 305–6n6 Fashwave, 230–42, 231, 241 imaginary fascination, 242 music, 234, 243n21 Retro-Futurism, 233–40, 236, 239 Fashwave Artists, 241 Faye, Guillaume, 237 fear, 150–1, 151 feedback loops, 174 feminism, 112 Ferreira, Virginia, 156n13 fictioning, 55 Fielitz, Maik, 12 First International Dada Fair, 86 Flatness project, 300–3, 302 Floyd, George, murder of, 5, 41–2 Fluxus movement, 127, 128, 144 Fook Island, 128 Frankfurt School, 190 Franz Ferdinand, assassination of, 25 free data flow, 184 free will, 7 freedom, 197–8 freedom of speech, 6, 147 free-enterprise logic, 191 Freud, Sigmund, 176 From an Ethnographic Museum series (Höch), 110–2, 111 Furie, Matt, 251 Futurism, 44, 53n4, 57, 231, 236–7, 252–3

INDEX

Gagnon, Dominic, 224 Gamard, Burns, 176 gamification, 249–50 Gammel, Irene, 99, 284 Garcia, David, 280 Garza, Alicia, 118 gatekeepers, art establishment, 135 Gates, Bill, 205 Gaza Strip, 200 George Soros Meme, 32, 33 Germany, 7 alt-right, 221 Post-World War I, 56–8, 65–6n10 Spartacus revolt, 30 Giedion, Sigfried, 170 gig economy, 203 Gillespie, John, 116 Glazer, Lee Stephens, 114 global financial crisis, 2008, 56, 57 Global South, perspective, 135 Goerzen, Matt, 220–1, 226 Goffrey, Andrew, 26 Goldberg, RoseLee, 57 Golumbia, David, 195n13 Google, 7, 185–6, 204, 211n30, 272, 287–90, 299, 305n3 Deep Dream, 218 Google threads, 171 go-pro camera, 239–40 Gramsci, Antonio, 101n2 Grandmaster Flash, 271 Great Replacement, 238–40, 239 Great South African Queue (Kukama), 131, 131 Grillo, Beppe, 254 Gropius, Walter, 253 Gross, Otto, 87 Grosz, George, 248, 268, 269, 277n11 grottos, 170–1, 171–2, 172–3, 177 Guattari, Felix, 138, 199 Gutai Group, 144 Haakenson, Thomas, 116 Habermas, Jurgen, 45 hacken, 28 Hacker Manifesto (Wark), 27–8, 30 hacking, 23, 28 Halpern, Orit, 174

315

Harari, Yaval Noah, 136 Harley, Ross, 270 Harney, Stefano, 200 Harsin, Jayson, 1–2 hashtags, 118 hatred, 34–5, 36 Hausmann, Raoul, 3, 10, 36, 56, 57–8, 58–60, 63, 87, 168, 267, 268–9 Sound-Rel, 24–6, 25, 35 Heartfield, John, 86–7, 103n15, 128, 248, 268, 269, 276, 277n11 The Nation Stands United Behind Me, 87, 89, 90 photomontages, 87, 89, 90, 93 Hegenbart, Sarah, 11 Heidegger, Martin, 192 hierarchy, patterns of, 109 Hilderbrand, Lucas, 270 historical inquiry, 46 historical materialism, 194 historiography, 46 history, 173–4 killing off of, 46–7 Hobbes, Thomas, 207–8, 211n32 Höch, Hannah, 80, 86, 113, 129, 248, 255, 268 collage, 110–2, 111 Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 28, 29, 34, 35 From an Ethnographic Museum series, 110–2, 111 eyeball iconography, 78 photomontages, 86–7, 88, 93 Russian Dancer (My Double), 87, 88 Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, 110 Hollywood Burn (Soda Jerk), 268, 270–1, 271 Hoy, Meredith, 10 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 23, 58, 172–3 human body, staging, 101 human rights, 82, 133 humour, 136, 253-5 Hungary, 225–6

316

husks, 177 hybridity, 87 Iberian dawn (Rego), 151–2, 152 Identitarian Movement, 223, 237 identity, 119 Dada, 104n18 performance of, 98, 99, 101 idiocy, 286–7 imaginary fascination, 242 immediacy, 175 implementation details, 26 indeterminacy, 52 information, 48 information commodification, 28 information economy, 47 information overload, 189 information technology, arts relation to, 49 information technology revolution, 136 information theory, 47 inner life, exposure of, 171–2 Instagram, 134 institutional racism, 135 instrumentalization, 189–90, 193 interactivity, 301 intermediality, 6 internet, 6, 8, 117–8 Internet of Things, 199 intervention, 35 IOCOSE, 10 Dadasourcing, 261, 262–3 Iran, 82, 84 Iraq, invasion of, 2003, 57, 66n12 irreverence, 257 isolation, 170–1 Israeli military, 200 Italy, 230, 252–3 Jacobson, Siegfried, 59 Jafa, Arthur, 108, 226 Jarry, Alfred, Ubu Roi, 128–9 Johnson, Charles Carlisle, 295 Johnson, Greg, 233 Jones, Amelia, 99 Joseph, Kahlil, 118 Jung, Franz, 87 juxtapositions, 29, 91

INDEX

Kaiser, Brittany, 31 Kaprow, Allan, 127 Keller, Daniel, 218 Kelly, Deborah, 268 Kelly, Kevin, 193 Kentridge, William, 129 keywords, 287–8 Khanna, Shama, 300–3, 302 Kiel mutiny, 30 Kill All Normies (Nagle), 32, 33–4, 219–20, 253–4 killer clowns, 254 KissPál, Szabolcs, 225–6 Kittler, Friedrich, 193 Klee, Paul, 46, 47 Klein, Naomi, 56–7 Klemperer, Victor, 218 Klout, 187, 191 knowledge industry, upheavals, 48 knowledge-sharing, 300 Koerner, Natalie P., 11 Kölmel, Mara-Johanna, 10 Krauss, Rosalind, 54n22, 91 Kriebel, Sabine, 35 Kukama, donna, 10 Great South African Queue, 131, 131 Page One-Fifty-Two, 159–62 Lacerda, Alberto de, 149, 150 Lachrymatory Agent (Soleimani), 76, 77, 78 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 55–6 language, 43, 46, 90 ownership of, 12 performative power, 218 Lavin, Maud, 110–1, 112 Lennon, John, 128 Levine, Sam, 5 LeWitt, Sol, 51, 52, 115, 116 Lippard, Lucy, 51 Lisbon, 149–50, 154 live art, 131–2 lizvlx, 60 Lukács, Georg, 269, 274 Luther, Martin, 206 Lyotard, Jean-François, 4

INDEX

McBride, Patrizia, 30 machine-learning, 165, 177–8, 217–8 McIntyre, Lee, 108 Maigret, Nicolas, 221–2 Makela, Maria, 112 Makhubu, Nomusa, 132 male separatism, 222 Malta, Eduardo, 156n18 Mamdani, Mahmood, 107 manifestations, 44 Manovich, Lev, 272, 274 Marinetti, Tommaso, 57 Marten, Helen, 248, 248–9, 254, 257 Marx, Karl, 194, 201–3 Marynowsky, Tara, 268 masculinity, toxic, 222 masks, 93 mass hysteria, 178 mass media, as political propaganda, 177 mass society, 178 Maxwele, Chumani, 132 Mbembe, Achille, 135 meaning, 173 slipperiness of, 43 media art, 52 media hoaxes, 10 Berlin Dada, 55–6, 58–60, 63 contemporary acts, 60–3, 63–4 legacy, 55–6 political context, 56–8 media landscape, 3 Medium of Exchange series (Soleimani), 91, 91–3, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97–8, 97, 98 Mejia, Robert, 4 memes, 32–4, 39n43, 295 alt-right, 231, 251 memetic warfare, 32 memorials, 82, 84 memories, 167 memory, 175–6, 176 memory image, 205–6 Men Going Their Own Way, 222 Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de, 146 mental health, 304 Mercer, Kobena, 113 Mercer, Robert, 225, 298 Merz art, 175

317

Merz movement, 169 Merzbau (Schwitters), 11, 165–78, 166, 167, 168 access, 170 approach, 174 as archive, 165–7, 170, 173–6, 176–7 associative triggers, 173 as big data, 174–5 culmination, 169 curation, 170 exposure of inner life, 171–2 extent, 169 grottos, 170–1, 171–2, 172–3, 177 growth, 168–9, 169 layers, 176 materials, 168–70 and memory, 175–6 project, 169 meta-narrative, 4 MeWe, 308n22 Michelsen, Nicholas, 254 Microsoft, 205 Tay chatbot, 217–8 militarism, 126 Miro, Juan, 145 misrepresentation, 294–5, 305–6n6 modernity, 50 Moffatt, Tracey, 268 Monbiot, George, 254 montage, 6 memes, 32–4, 33 montage mädels, 9 Our Collective Practice: A Visual Essay, 69, 70–2 Morozov, Evgeny, 195–6n13 Moten, Fred, 200 Mouffe, Chantal, 109 Msezane, Sethembile, 132–3 Mtshali, Oswald, 128 Mudde, Cas, 8, 38n31 multiple dialectics, 84 Murray, Brett, 136–7, 137 Nagle, Angela, 8–9, 220 Kill All Normies, 32, 33–4, 219–20, 253–4 Nassehi, Armin, 118–9 Nation Stands United Behind Me, The (Heartfield), 87, 89, 90

318

INDEX

National Anthem (Soleimani), 76, 80, 98, 99 National Society of Fine Arts, Portugal, 148, 150, 156n18 nationalism, 56–7, 126, 137, 144 NATO, 144 Neda¯ (Soleimani), 78, 79, 80 Neo-Dada, 127, 139 neo-fascism, 252 neo-Nazis, 230 Neo-reactionary Movement, 223 network thinking, 172 networks, 117, 134, 172–3, 178 New Media, 6 New Right, 252 design strategies, 35–6 new technology, 48 news-industrial complex, 118 Ngcobo, Gabi, 131 Niceron, Jean-François, 206 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58, 60–1 Nix, Alexander, 30–1 Noble, Safiya, 118 nonsense, 177 Norway, 222–3 Nouveau Realisme, 127, 144 NSA [National Security Agency] scandal, 184, 185, 186 Obama, Barack, 108, 118, 199 online activism, South Africa, 133–5, 134 Online Civic Culture Centre, 297 Orbán, Viktor, 225–6 O’Sullivan, Simon, 55 Our Collective Practice: A Visual Essay (montage mädels), 69, 70–2 outsourcing, 203 Overton window, 221 Page One-Fifty-Two (Kukama), 159–62 Palestinians, 200 parafiction, 10 Berlin Dada, 58–60 contemporary acts, 60–3, 63–4 definition, 55 media hoaxes, 64 political context, 56–8

paranoia, 197–8 Paris, 3 Parisi, Luciana, 26 Pasquinelli, Matteo, 201 Pather, Jay, 131–2 Patterson, Zabet, 54n28 PayPal, 223 Peláez, Juan Sebastián, 248 Pendleton, Adam, Black Dada, 115–7, 115 Pepe the Frog, 251, 252 perception management, 69 perception theory, 194n2 performance, 98–9, 99, 100, 101 South Africa, 128, 128–9, 129–33, 130, 131, 133 performative power, 218 performativity, 281 Pernes, Fernando, 144, 148 personal data commodification of, 7 exploitation of, 184–5 personalization, 171 persuasion, artistic modes of, 2 photography, 84, 91 photomontage, 9, 10–1, 23, 28–30, 29, 34, 110, 267, 268–9 critical perversity, 93 Heartfield, 87, 89, 90, 93 Höch, 86–7, 88, 93 juxtapositions, 91 political art, 75 power, 269 recuperative impulse, 80, 82 rephotography, 76 soft sculptures, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86 Soleimani, 75–101 violence, 80 see also collage Photoshop, 34 Pinkrah, Nelly Y., 117 Pinto, Ana Teixeira, 198 piracy, 274 Pixel Pirate mission statement, 271 Plastique Fantastique, 55 Platonov, Andrey, 203 Pocket Rocket (Self), 105, 106, 107, 108–9, 119 polarization, 302

INDEX

police brutality, 41–2 political correctness, 254 political narratives, post-truth, 292–304 alt-right tactics, 297–8 artist responses, 293, 298–304, 302 context, 294–5 emotional interoperation, 292 impact, 295 misrepresentation tactics, 305–6n6 role of images, 295–7 veracity, 292, 295 political propaganda, 177 politicians, post-truth, 2 politics aestheticization of, 208–9 alt-right aestheticization, 230–42 disillusionment with, 56–7 pop art, 127 populism, 56, 107, 292 Portugal, 143–55 art historiography, 146 Estado Novo, 143–4 legal repression of women, 156n13 National Society of Fine Arts, 148, 150, 156n18 as rogue state, 157n25 Segunda Exposição de Artes Plásticas exhibition, 148 vigilance of authority, 147 Portuguese Writers Society, 149 post-democracy, 107 post-internet art, 246–57 postmodern challenge, 135 postmodernism, 4 post-truth, 11, 107–9, 119, 126, 294–5 alt-right tactics, 297–8 appeal to emotions, 1–2 artist responses, 293, 298–304, 302 conceptions of, 4–6 Dada and, 4–6 emotional interoperation, 292 impact, 295 origins, 4 political narratives, 292–304 rise of, 1 role of images, 295–7 South Africa, 126, 135–9, 137, 139 veracity, 292, 295

319

power relations, 4–5, 131, 192–4 precarious data aesthetics, 280–90 Dada tactics, 281–5, 282–3 in data, 287–90, 288 definition, 280 digital Dada, 285–7, 286 tactics, 280–1 predictive analytics, 185 predictive data, monetization, 304 preppers, 224 present tense, 175 Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, The (Bearden), 113–4, 113 principles, stand against, 45 print revolution, 206 privacy, 165, 167, 171, 178, 184, 298 private property relations, 30 proactive solutions, 189 procedure, 51–2, 52 incorporation of, 45 profiling, 186 programming, 45 property, 30, 167 protest, 41–2 psychoanalysis, 87 psychographics, 31 public insurgency, 41–2 public sphere, commodification of, 118–9 public-management society, 187 QAnon, 5, 7–8, 17n52 racial amnesia, 4 racialization, 11 racism, 135 racist stereotypes, 5 Radical Software, 270 Rafman, Jon, 247, 249, 251, 255–6 randomness, 254, 257, 286 reading, 189–90 Readmill, 189 reality, 204 Reas, Casey, 52 All Your Face Are Belong to Us, 49–50, 50 reason, 138 rebellion, 44 reconfiguration, 176

320

INDEX

Reconquista Germanica, 221 recycling, 174 Red Pill forum, 223 Reddit, 223 reductionism, 48 Reekie, Jonathan, 287–90 Rego, Paula, 11, 143–55 annus horribilis, 1965, 148–50 artistic references, 145 background, 143–4, 155n6, 156n14 childish quality, 145 creative gestures, 153–4 Dada strategies, 144 The dogs of Barcelona, 152–3, 153, 154 first solo show, 144, 147–8, 148–50, 154, 157n28 Iberian dawn, 151–2, 152 imagery, 146 National Society of Fine Arts exhibition, 148, 150 Salazar vomiting the homeland, 145–8, 145 Segunda Exposição de Artes Plásticas exhibition, 148 titles, 154 transfigurative performance, 147–8 travels, 144–5 Trilogy of fear, 150–1, 151 Reis, Bruno Cardoso, 157n25 remixing, 12, 271–2, 274 rephotography, 76 resistance, 10, 12 iconographies of, 11 responsive solutions, 189 Retro-Futurism, 231, 233–40, 236, 239 RhodesMustFall, 132 Richter, Hans, 44, 253, 256 right-wing extremist movements, characteristics, 38n31 right-wing hatred, 34–5, 36 Rinky, Klaus, 128 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 5 Roof, Dylann, 226, 241 Ross, Joan, 12, 277 The claiming of things, 268, 272–4, 273 Roszkowska, Maria, 221–2

Russia, 67n33 Russian Dancer (My Double) (Höch), 87, 88 Sacks, Shelley, 128 Salavon, Jason, 49 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 143, 145–6, 149 Salazar vomiting the homeland (Rego), 145–8, 145 Sampson, Tony D., 138–9, 139 scandal, 4 Scheurich, James, 135 Schneider, Rebecca, 129, 131 Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Höch), 110 Schou, Jannick, 4, 6 Schwitters, Ernst, 169 Schwitters, Kurt An Anna Blume, 173 approach, 174, 175 archiving, 165–7, 170, 173–6, 176–7 exposure of inner life, 171–2 flees Gestapo, 169 grottos, 170–1, 171–2, 172–3, 177 materials, 168–70 and meaning, 173 Merz 21, 172 Merzbau, 11, 165–78, 166, 167, 168 methodology, 169 networks, 172–3 obsessive self-archiving, 174 preservation strategy, 172–3 privacy, 171 project, 169 public relevance, 172 under surveillance, 169–70 SCL Group, 30–1 Scourti, Erica, 12–3 Difficult to Find the Lost Things, 287–90, 288 Seage, Lucas, 128 security, 184 Seibt, Constantin, 218 self, the, 87 Self, Tschabalala, Pocket Rocket, 105, 106, 107, 108–9, 119

INDEX

self-criticism, 45 self-development, 191 self-sufficiency, 193 Servin, Jacques, 61 settler colonialism, 4, 208 sexual subjectivity, 147 shamanism, 128 Shannon, Claude, 47 sharing economy, 203 shock, 4 signifiers, 43 signs, 43 Simanowski, Roberto, 11 Simmel, Georg, 193 Simon, Joshua, 11 Simoniti, Vid, 12 Sironi, Mario, 253 Situationist International, 127 skill, 51 Skinner, B. F., 204 Slade School, 155n6 Smith, Jack, 238 Smith, Kathryn, 125 Smith, Rebecca, 10 social capital, 187 social consciousness, 304 social engineering, 188–92 social influence, 138–9 social justice, 12 social learning theory, 84, 86 social media, 8, 11, 69, 134–5, 134 exposure of inner life, 171–2 networks, 178 social networks, 172 social sculpture, 128 social turn, 57 society digitization of, 6 and technology, 201–3 Soda Jerk, 12, 274, 277 Hollywood Burn, 268, 270–1, 271 The Was, 268, 274–6, 275 soft sculptures, Soleimani, Sheida, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86 software art, 51 software developers, 185 software studies, 51 Soleimani, Sheida, 10–1, 75–101, 86

321

acting and performance, 98–9, 99, 101 Atefeh, 82, 83 background, 76, 101–2n3 critical perversity, 93 divergent attitudes, 91 engagement with her personal history, 84 focus on colonialism, 98 hybridity, 87 iconography, 80 intermediality, 75 Lachrymatory Agent, 76, 77, 78 Medium of Exchange series, 91, 91–3, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97–8, 97, 98 National Anthem, 76, 80, 98, 99 Neda¯ , 78, 79, 80 To Oblivion series, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90–1 photomontage soft sculptures, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86 political art, 75 practice, 75–6 Raheleh, 84, 85 rephotography, 76 strategies, 75–6 as subaltern cyborg, 98–9, 101 Vitriolic Acid: An Eye for an Eye, 80, 81, 82 Sound-Rel (Hausmann), 24–6, 25, 35 South Africa, 9–10, 11, 125–39 ANC failure, 126 China and, 135 Dada strategies, 125 inspiration of Dada, 125 liberation struggle, 125 live art, 131–2 Lonmin Platinum mine massacre, 133–4 online activism, 133–5, 134 performance, 128, 128–9, 129–33, 130, 131, 133 political resistance, 127–9 post-truth, 126, 135–9, 137, 139 Rainbow Nation phase, 126 Shackville protest, 132, 133 Soweto Uprising, 128, 130 transition to democracy, 126

322

Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 129 Southern, Jack, 13 Soweto Uprising, 128, 130 spam, 249 Spartacus revolt, 30 Spencer, Richard, 233 Spenser, Richard, 198 Speth, Gus, 139 spiritual renewal, 127, 139 Squires, Catherine R., 117 Staal, Jonas, 224–5 Stalder, Felix, 6, 107 Stanley, Jason, 112 statistical evaluation, 186 statues, toppling, 42, 132 Steyerl, Hito, 82, 102–3n10, 205–6, 247–8, 248–9, 249, 249–50, 252, 294–5 storage media, 175 subjecthood, 255 subjectivity, 146 Sudhalter, Adrian, 58 Sullivan, Curtis, 4 Summly, 189, 191 Surrealist photography, 91 surveillance, 7, 117, 169–70, 294–5, 301, 304 Susik, Abigail, 147 Swarm Theory (Davis and Buckland), 137–8, 138 Sydney Super 8 Group, 269–70 tactical media art, 12–3, 280–1, 290 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie, 86, 129 Tarde, Gabriel, 126, 138 Tarrant, Brenton, 238–40, 239 Tay chatbot, 217–8 Taylor, Jane, 129 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 109 Taz, 261 technocratic rationality, 185 techno-culture, 48 technologies, repurposing, 42 technology destructive powers, 199–201 power relations, 192–4 and society, 201–3 Telegram, 234

INDEX

tenderness, 35 theft, artistic strategies of, 12, 267–77 Berlin Dada, 267 political criteria, 267 remixing, 271–2 Thiel, Peter, 223–4 Thomas, Michael, 113 To Oblivion series (Soleimani), 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90 Tokolos Stencil Collective, 134 totalitarianism, 150–1 Toussaint, Denise, 112 toxicity, 69 transgressive humour, 253–5 transmission media, 175 transnational openness, 3 transparency, 184 trash, and data, 173–6, 177–8 Trecartin, Ryan, 247, 250, 251, 257 Trilogy of fear (Rego), 150–1, 151 trolls, 220 Tronti, Mario, 202 Trump, Donald, 1, 7, 32, 223–4, 252, 254, 295, 297 false or misleading statements, 64n4 Russian interference, 67n33 supreme court justices appointment, 5 tweets, 107 Trump Election Reporting Devices (Yes Men), 62 trust, erosion of, 293 truth attack on, 2 disappearance of, 6 dissembling, 42 distortion of, 4 truth value, 105 truth-telling, 254 Tsai, Jaime, 12 Tumblr, 230 Twitter, 7, 39n36, 303 Tzara, Tristan, 3, 51, 130, 148 ‘Dada Manifesto’, 3, 23, 24, 43–5 UBERGMORGEN.COM, 56, 60–1, 62–3, 63–4 UBERMORGEN, 10 Ubu and the Truth Commission

INDEX

(Taylor and Kentridge, 129 Ubu Roi (Jarry), 128–9 United States of America Capitol attack, 6 January 2021, 5, 7–8, 198–9 Civil Rights Act, 112–3 Democratic National Convention, 2017, 61–2 frontier myth, 108 Jim Crow Laws, 114 murder rate of Black people, 5 presidential election, 2000, 63 presidential election, 2016, 62 presidential election, 2017, 67n33, 225 Russian interference, 67n33 segregation, 114 supreme court justices appointment, 5 Trump presidency, 5 white supremacy, 105–6 urban psychogeography, 210n20 Vamos, Igor, 61 Van Dyck, Anthony, 206 van Wyk, Roger, 11 Varian, Hal, 26 veracity, 292, 295, 303 Vero, 308n22 video collage, 118 Vieira, Luandino, 149 violence alt-right aestheticization, 230–42 identifying, 36 photomontage, 80 scripted, 240 visibility, 41–2 virality, 138–9 Vitriolic Acid: An Eye for an Eye (Soleimani), 80, 81, 82 von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa, 12–3, 99, 100, 101, 135, 254, 286, 289, 290, 290n5 A Dozen Cocktails—Please, 281–5, 282–3 performative lifestyle, 281 [V]ote-auction.com, 63

323

Wa Lehulere, Kemang, Dog of Orion, 9–10, 130, 130, 213, 214 Walden, Herwarth, 170 Wall Street Journal, 190 Wark, McKenzie, 23 Hacker Manifesto, 27–8, 30 The Was (Soda Jerk), 268, 274–6, 275 Watson, Paul Joseph, 251–2 Weaver, Warren, 47 Weimar Republic, 57, 60, 125 Wescher, Herta, 110 Western art canon, 105 white privilege, 107–9 white self-pity, 226 white supremacist stereotypes white supremacy, 11, 12, 34, 135, 230, 231, 232 Black resistance, 105–19 institution, 118 system of domination, 105–6 Wiener, Norbert, 172, 174, 199 Willing, Victor, 146, 149–50, 155n4 With Open Gates, 250–1, 252 women, 82 legal repression, 156n13 sexual subjectivity, 147 World Health Organization, 7 world order, decentring, 1 World War I, 3, 44 abstraction as response to, 25–6 casualties, 26 political propaganda, 177 World Wide Web, 57 Wylie, Christopher, 5 Wyman, Jemina, 217–8 Wynter, Sylvia, 208 Yes Men, the, 10, 60, 61–2, 63–4 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 223 Yoko Ono, 128 YouTube, 39n36, 134, 221, 250–7 Zuboff, Shoshana, 7, 117, 204 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 114 Zurich, 3

324

PLATE 1 Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, 1919. Collage, 114 × 90 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 / Photo: © bpk / Nationalgalerie.

PLATE 2 Casey Reas, All Your Face Are Belong To Us (Followers 1K), 2015. Code, digital images, computer, screen, 1080 × 1920 pixels. © Casey Reas.

PLATE 3 Sheida Soleimani, Minister of Petroleum (Angola), Secretary of State (United States, 1973–77), 2017. Archival pigment print, 40 × 60 in. © 2021 Sheida Soleimani.

PLATE 4 Tschabalala Self, Pocket Rocket, 2020. Digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on dyed canvas, 244 × 244 × 4 cm / 96 × 96 × 1 1/2 in. © Tschabalala Self. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / New York. Photo: Matt Grubb.

PLATE 5 Adam Pendleton, Black Dada (A/A), 2019. Silkscreen ink on canvas, in two panels, overall: 243.8 × 192.7 cm; 96 × 75 7/8 in, each panel: 121.9 × 192.7 cm.; 48 × 75 7/8 in. © Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler.

PLATE 6 Buyani Duma and Thato Ramaisa perform as Desire Marea and Fela Gucci as the performance art duo FAKA. Photographed by Viviane Sassen, 2015 © Viviane Sassen.

PLATE 7 Still image from Swarm Theory V1.0 directed by Kyla Davis and Daniel Buckland at the National Arts Festival, Makhanda, 2019. Copyright: Kyla Davis, Photo Credit: Daylin Paul.

PLATE 8 Paula Rego, Salazar vomiting the homeland, 1960. Oil on canvas, 94 × 120 cm. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum – Modern Collection, Lisbon, Portugal. © Paula Rego. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough, New York and London.

PLATE 9 Jennifer Chan, Boyfriend, 2014. Video artwork (6:26), video still (at 1:24). © Jennifer Chan.

PLATE 10 IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Dada means nothing), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

PLATE 11 IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Boom boom), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

PLATE 12 IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Abolition of the future), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

PLATE 13 IOCOSE, Dadasourcing (Everything we look at is false), 2018. Crowdsourced image. Printed with permission of the artists.

PLATE 14 Joan Ross, ‘The naming of things’, The claiming of things, 2012. Digital video, 7:36 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney.

PLATE 15 Erica Scourti, Difficult to Find the Lost Things, 2019, detail. Printed with permission of the artist.

PLATE 16 Flatness screengrab Feb 2019, showing artwork by Nikhil Vettukattil. © Shama Khanna, 2021. Image courtesy of flatness.eu, and reproduced with the permission of Shama Khanna.