P.1 How can one think of art institutions in an age that is defined by
planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital
technology?
P.3 Conflict is not a means to force a resolution of a disputed situation,
but a tool to sustain it. A stagnant crisis is the point. It needs to be
indefinite because it is an abundant source of profit: instability is a
gold mine without bottom.
P.37 By now, more people than ever are able to upload an almost unlimited
number of self-representations. And the level of political participation
by way or parliamentary democracy seems to have dwindled in the meantime.
While pictures float in numbers, elites are shrinking and centralising
power. … Humans and things intermingle in ever-newer constellations to
become bots or cyborgs. As humans feed affect, thought, and sociality into
algorithms, algorithms feed back into what used to be called subjectivity.
This shift is what has given way to a post-representational politics
adrift within information space.
P.47 Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is
passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses.
Contemporary perception is mechanic to a large degree.
P.56 If they are dreams, those dreams can be interpreted as condensations
or displacements of the current technological dispositions.
P.58 Today, expressions of life as reflected in data trails become a
farmable, harvestable, mixable resource managed by informational
biopolitics.
⠀And if you doubt that this is another age of magical thinking, just
look at the NSA training manual for unscrambling hacked drone intercepts.
As you can see, you need to bewitch the files with a magic wand.
P.71 If models for reality increasingly consist of sets of data
unintelligible to human vision, the reality created after them might be
partly unintelligible for humans too. Images in which whole lives become
patterns that autonomous machines use to gossip about you or pull the
trigger.
P.71 He (Oleg Fonaryov) asked one question: What if human evolution
responded to the change of light sources around us? For millions of years,
the only light on earth came from the starts and the sun, maybe some fire
or candles. Now there are a lot of electric lights and tons of screens.
Not to speak of those postman documentaries flying through the bones of
the dead and the living. In the history of evolution, organic bodies have
changed to deal with changing environments. What senses, what organs will
people grow to pick up invisible images? To decode data streams that we
cannot presently detect? How will people evolve in order to adapt to an
environment modelled on unintelligible images?
P.78 To brutally summarise a lot of scholarly texts: contemporary art is
made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art
fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let’s add
asymmetric warfare—as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of
wealth—real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and
deregulated financial markets to this list.
P.186 If art is an alternative currency, its circulation also outlines an
operational infrastructure. Could these structures be repossessed to work
differently?