Fantasy Reality / The New Cold War is Philosophical
Our statement that today was (quite brutally) cut short by the moderator of Hacking Habitat’s opening discussion:
Here’s something that’s more to do with the future of our imagination, and less to do with the so-called “end of privacy.” Though these things are all connected. Because when surveillance disables our thinking, we can surely not imagine anything. The idea of an independent cyberspace that exists off-limits to state power is deeply rooted in the idealism of the early internet. It’s like the sea once was: an unregulated and fluid space, that today is overlaid with restrictions, surveillance, infrastructures. It feels less and less like a network, and more like a series of closed platforms, each of which contains a fully consistent reality. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know what surveillance looks like when it stares into the mirror and sees itself. The NSA’s logos, found in the PowerPoint presentations which Snowden leaked, show that even the most secret operation cannot exist without visual representation, and even, branding.
In the video for Holly Herndon’s Home, we used these same NSA logos as graphic walls and data rains, behind which the artist reveals herself, like a black, texting shadow. Art and politics belong together, and we know that their belonging is dangerous. While there may be no such thing as “political beauty,” we instinctively know that all beauty is political. All aesthetics are political. Emotion is too.
What seems necessary is a form of strategic art. An art that is able to function as a forward projected propaganda for progressive politics. Capturing our emotions but looking at the future. Art, but strategic.
In our documentary and music video The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda) we show that propaganda is no longer about creating a single story or ideology and sticking to it. It is about piercing through your opponent’s bubbles, creating new ones in their place. It is about creating a truth and believing until it bursts, like a soap bubble.
The conflict in Russia and Ukraine, central to The Sprawl, is a proxy for other fights that are maybe more philosophical. These are about different, parallel, opposing ideas of reality itself.
Is this the future of political protest? Not so much a change through the “legitimate” channels, not so much a systemic overhaul by “the people” versus “elites” or “the establishment,” but something more silent, more far-reaching: the act of denying the other the right to address the same reality.
As Chelsea Manning asked: “Is it radical to be true to yourself?” It is.