Ana Finel Honigman. How can net.activism reach the most varied audience within the cyber-community?
Coco Fusco. That concern is not always relevant. The Internet serves many activists working on similar issues by enabling them to communicate and share sensitive information. Some activist causes promoted on the Internet are being addressed to specific communities and often require expert intervention rather than mass support. Communities of interest are formed via the Internet – list serves [electronic mailing lists], bulletin boards and other online communal structures that are used to locate possible petition-signers, march participants, etc. If certain kinds of activism require disseminating information widely, then access to many email lists is essential. For example, the Floodnet Virtual Sit-In software works only when several thousand users apply it to the same target. A large-scale Floodnet action is preceded by well-orchestrated messages sent to dozens of mailing lists.
Unfortunately, what is more common is the
Internet’s use to gather petition signatures. Like most recipients, I delete
the overwhelming majority of unsolicited petitions I receive because of
excess email. I doubt the efficiency of such action anyway. The most
effective net.activism acts as an organising tool that collapses distances
and enables activists to exchange data quickly and work together. Some
activists have tried to find virtual equivalents to traditional street-level
actions. For example, hacktivists have asked: what is civil disobedience
online? These experiments permit hacktivists to confront government
entities, the national security apparatus, the judiciary, and legal
theorists. They define free speech, civil disobedience and transnational
intervention through action and reaction.
Then how can net.art alter the perception of cyberspace as a disembodied
arena promoting fluid identities?
Cyberspace is a disembodied arena in the sense that virtual reality, while dependent on ‘real-life’ hardware and software for its visualisation and reception, involves an immaterial visual dimension. Net.art exists within that liminal zone between the physical and the virtual. Cyber-culture boasts scores of enthusiasts who celebrate the Internet and virtual reality as ‘transcendence’ over the limitations of the body and physical world. However, there are examples of cyber-theory and net.art that offer a critique of this celebration of disembodiment and that deconstruct the notion of fluid identities. These critiques question whether identity can ever be enacted without such constraining factors as history, even online. No choice is ever entirely free or original. Such critiques often highlight the pre-existing sexist, Eurocentric and colonist narratives embedded in the Internet, MUDs [Multiple User Dimension, Multiple User Dungeon, or Multiple User Dialogue: a programme which allows the user to take control of a computerised persona], computer games, cyber-punk fiction, and advertising or popular media about cyberspace. These narratives are often implicit endorsements of neo-liberal economy philosophies.
Even common and seemingly innocuous net.art historiography is loaded. The idea that digital media and net.art ‘saved’ economically disadvantaged Eastern European artists from marginalisation within the European art context rests on a technocentric view of the digital revolution as a democratising force offering Eastern Europeans access to whiteness’s full benefits which include transcending geopolitical barriers. My net.performance, DOLORES FROM 10 TO 10, underscored subaltern female labourers’ abject relation to the digital revolution. My online activist efforts have focused on ways of politicising cyber-feminism and using the Internet to engage in direct action on- and offline. I have repeatedly raised the question of how actual subaltern bodies and identities are objectified and commodified within the global information economy. Following the work of my peers, I have used the Internet to engage in an international dialogue about characteristics of gender, racial and economic oppression in the digital age. The suppression of these issues by those who embrace the idea that the digital enables us to transcend the real world is the first thing that needs to be taken apart and scrutinised in such debates.
Have declined economics in dotcom culture created a more open or conservative cyber-community?
The dotcom bust has certainly made it difficult for nineties cyber-utopians to flaunt their success, as if it itself were evidence for the virtual’s superiority over the physical. Also, museums and other institutions expecting huge sums for exhibitions and acquisitions from dotcom donors have had to lower their expectations. Legions of dotcom executives and designers are unemployed or underemployed, therefore are unable to buy digital art or indulge in digital toys and arty computer games. The designers and programmers who moonlighted as net.artists and bankrolled their own projects without grants are also disappearing. But the bust has meant that many disgruntled cyber-utopians have become anti-globalisation activists and lent their skills to civic-minded causes. Since so many dotcoms shut down, areas in Manhattan, Brooklyn and San Francisco are seeing the return of local communities and artists displaced by the high rents of the Internet boom. And folded companies abandoned machines which are being recycled by artists and arts organisations.
Despite these changes, it is important to take into account that this is a period of increasing political conservatism and a generalised economic recession. As a result of these as well as other factors, the big money in digital technology is shifting from e-commerce and genetics towards nanotechnology and telerobotics controlled by the military. While academia and art schools hoped their burgeoning digital media programmes would attract major funders, in the past three years I have heard dozens of stories about schools seeking to trim the non-commercial, non-pragmatic areas of their digital media programmes. The cultural studies analysis of the digital has been abandoned, as has non-commercial, political or community-based digital work. Any electronic art that is not a celebration of gadgets and software is being dismissed. Eliminating the critique allows digital art programmes to be easily turned into feeders for the industry.
How does your online discussion group Undercurrents utilise the activist possibilities of new media?
Undercurrents was started in 2001-02 by me, Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding and Irina Aristarkhova; we hail from different places and opinions. We don’t have to agree and actually it is quite refreshing to engage in an online discussion that does not demand consensus or even endless words of praise. Right now we have about 200 participants from the US, Canada, Europe, India, Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Brazil. I wanted to launch a different cyber-feminist dialogue online. I felt most cyber-feminist lists were careerist and technophilic. I wanted a discussion on women and technology that would shift away from a few white women in the US, Europe and Australia to deal with the abject and oppressive relationship of thousands of women globally to technology; how digital technology, neo-liberalism and globalisation affects the lives of poor women. I no longer wanted to talk about the digital divide or presume that workshops turning technophobes into ‘experts’ was the prime issue regarding global inequities of new technology.
Ana Finel Honigman is currently reading for a Masters of Studies in the History of Art and Visual Culture at Oxford University, Mansfield College