<nettime> Drowning man with cell-phone

["A. Andreas" <ajaco@xs4all.nl>]

Creative insurgency opposes established cultural domination

Contrary to creative resistance, creative insurgency, aims to 
overthrown and re-establish a new kind of creative order, in which 
the might and prowess of the mainstream art world is definitively 
pushed aside to make place for a more profound and human based 
faculty of sharing and re-distributing objects of art and devotion.

Creative insurgency re-claims art's own, autonomous right to resist 
and subvert society's (mis) use of its idiomatic resources. Claims 
currently made by designers, merchants, industrialists and the like.

One of the key debates among art officials, (inter)national cultural 
experts and scholars concerns changes underway in the nature of 
insurgency. "Classic" insurgencies sought to seize power and evolved 
from underground and guerrilla forces. Contemporary insurgencies are 
characterized by linkage to broader systemic conflicts or failures 
normally involving networks as well as insurgents; by their use of 
the Internet and other forms of information technology; by the need 
to generate their own financial resources rather than relying on 
external sponsors; and by the desire to create political "space" in 
which to operate rather than the seizure of cultural power.

Cultural  forces are still struggling to understand contemporary 
insurgencies and find ways to counter them. This is a common pattern 
since insurgencies often take the form of "learning contests" between 
insurgents and counterinsurgents.

Purposely taken the army as a metonym for the strategic and longtem 
vision on how to achieve a given goal .i.e. to maintain or to 
surplant a wanted regime, by the use of power, creative insurgency 
uses in parallel the same theoretical foundations to achieve their 
goals. i,e. the liberation of art from capital.

Also in complete analogy with the army creative insurgency uses 
massive global propaganda means to find sufficient mass for its 
accomplishes. The widespread use of Internet, mailing lists, do it 
yourself activities arise worldwide producing a critical body of 
strongly motivated artists.

Modern life appears as a drowning man filming itself in its dead 
struggle, the sight of  a drowning man filming his own drowning in a 
world which as a whole is drowning is extremely absurd, there are  no 

spectators to watch left. It is as if the act of filming replaces  
life itself . The residual of life is more life than life itself . 
This scenery is really a last station, the complete artistically 
epigraphical  swan song of mankind, filmed on a cell-phone by a 
drowning man.

The act of seeing (active) gradually changing in the act of looking 
(passive) is exactly what modern global capitalism is doing with 
human mankind.. By replacing the means to create a life (rurality, 
agriculture, self protecting, autartic societies) with the means to 
earn a life( industries, labour, rent, mortgage, salary, funeral 
insurance) the accent slowly drifts from the active sense to the 
passive sense. Exemplified by the way internet developed  from a 
research instrument to an entertainment device. In this process which 
lasted a surprisenly short tem of about ten years, the presence of 
the web turned from a small interesting peer to peer group to a huge 
beast of milleniary proportions. The monster as the natural compagnon 
of a gigantic destroyer. The spider's web is an-eying the world , the 
eye lost its vision and is multiplied inwardly on a enormous scale , 
blinded by its own image like the drowning men filming its own 
drowning in a drowning world.

We are being reduced to garbage, we are the waste of existence, we 
are the remnants of life zombificated by capitalistic power systems, 
which more and more getting their feet into cultural practices. We 
are the real living dead who ... are in all possible ways trying to 
die. And on our way  feverelishy taken everyone with us. Every drop 
of life is vampirized by these machinery.

Media labs everywhere , digital culture studies at every university , 
call for art works , call for proposals, call for papers, call for 
citizen participations, all under the guiding eyes and financial 
protection of govermental and institutional supervision. Our eyes are 
subvisions , sub eyes, subordinated tentacles of the big tactic 
monster disguised under number of names as freemarket, nato, unesco, 
vn, gatt , g8, democracy, peoples republic, republic. Selling and 
marketing ideologies, goods, idead, opinions, academic curiiculli 
partaking in a rat race to compete , produce new, newer, hot hotter 
and even more sexier, erotic ways to seduce the few reluctant 
outsiders, to lost themselves in an overwhelming orgastic act of 
suicidal auto eroticism . Our senses a mere reciprocal facility of 
cooperative powers, disguised as democratic principles. Our bodies 
submerged in even more and more artificial pseudo-avataric states as 
Second Life, Sexual aid machineries penetrating our orifices with a 
50 days guarantee. Man turning into women, women turning into men,  
gratuiteous interchanging freudian sexual role notions.


Disengage, disgust, disembody, discourage, disgrace, dislike, 
discourse, disintegrate, dissolve


A. Andreas 19 Dekemember 2007


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