[p2p-research] Art and Culture in the Age of Security

[Michel Bauwens]

Creating Insecurity
Art and Culture in the Age of Security
DATA Browser Number 4
Edited by Wolfgang Sützl & Geoff Cox

Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought
of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the
progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes
itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among
several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of
the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political
legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state
which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile
organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terrorist.

Following the words of Giorgio Agamben (from his 2001 article “On Security
and Terror”), security has become the basic principle of international
politics after 9/11, and the “sole criterion of political legitimation.” But
security – reducing plural, spontaneous and surprising phenomena to a level
of calculability – also seems to operate against a political legitimacy
based on possibilities of dissent, and stands in clear opposition to
artistic creativity. Being uncalculable by nature, art is often incompatible
with the demands of security and consequently viewed as a “risk,” leading to
the arrest of artists, and a neutralization of innovative environments for
the sake of security.

Yet precisely the position of art outside the calculable seems to bring
about a new politicization of art, and some speak of art as “politics by
other means.” Has art become the last remaining enclave of a critique of
violence? Yet how “risky” can art be?

The contributors to DATA browser 04: CREATING INSECURITY address these
questions at the intersection of art, technology, and politics.

Contributors from Giorgio Agamben, Konrad Becker, Bureau of Inverse
Technology, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer, glorious ninth, Brian Holmes, carlos
katastrofsky, Martin Knahl, Norbert Koppensteiner, Daniela Ingruber, The
Institute for Applied Autonomy, Naeem Mohaiemen, Mukul Patel, Luis Silva,
Wolfgang Sützl, Tiziana Terranova, and McKenzie Wark.

http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&products_id=644


-- 
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