Social Technologies
Deconstruction, subversion, and the utopia of democratic communication
Inke Arns

This text explores the assumption that in a society increasingly influenced by media, an (artistic) change of media content or media structures can contribute significantly to democratizing society. The title, «Social Technologies,» is an attempt to pin down the ambivalent meaning of «(new) media» or «(new) technologies» as addressed by artists working with these media or technologies. On the one hand they are asking how much these media are being used for social conditioning, expressed in limitations, restrictions, surveillance and access control. At the same time they are examining how much these media can be used to create new public and social links and structures and thus can be turned into their opposite. Here utopias involving a social function for media are directed mainly at alternative channels independent of the mass media. [more]

Forerunners: Situationist Internationale, Burroughs and Gysin, Fluxus Appropriation, montage: Political/Analytical deconstruction The concept of alternative public quality: Video and media activism in the 1970s and 1980s Media activism Video as a medium of emancipation: From feminism to cyberfeminism Post-colonial discourse, transculturality, translocal identities Public space, media space Politico-artistic activism Net activism From video surveillance to dataveillance Summary