Radical Empiricism - Critical Art Ensemble: Recombinance & Tactics





More words. Awhile back I gave a talk at The Sinues of the Present: Genealogies of Biopolitics conference in Montrˆ©al, hosted by the Workshop in Radical Empiricism at the Universitˆ© de Montrˆ©al, a project of Brian Massumi and his quite capable graduate students.

The transcription of the talk - which is not a full paper but rather its skeletal outline - can be found here in .PDF :

[[ Critical Art Ensemble : Recombinance & Tactics ]]

A slightly modified version of this talk was delivered @ Artivistic 2005.

The abstract reads:

Media exposure and worldwide attention has followed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and prominent member Prof. Steve Kurtz, SUNY-Buffalo, since his 2004 arrest under the USA PATRIOT Act. Kurtz was ambiguously charged with bioterrorism by the FBI in concert with the Dept. of Homeland Security and other agencies. Although these charges have since been dropped, the continuing charges of mail and wire fraud against Kurtz and geneticist Dr. Robert Ferrell, University of Pittsburgh, suggest that the activities of dissenting artists--to the point of thought-crime and twisting the law at any cost--have become a new target in the "War on Terror." Through an analysis of CAE's tactics, critically entwined with new media and 'Net technologies, we will examine the broader political context of Electronic Civil Disobediance (ECD) and Fuzzy Biological Sabotage (FSB). Specifically, we will pose the question that if a digital world requires digital tactics, and if such tactics infer a contingent thinking of technology via the horizon of recombinance, are we not also facing the impact of recombinance on pre-emptive criminal law that seeks to punish not even _before_ the act, but in the act's absence?


posted. Thu - November 17, 2005 @ 11:52 AM           |