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

icon: authorInke 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]more

Text Sections
icon: heading Forerunners: Situationist Internationale, Burroughs and Gysin, Fluxusicon: heading Appropriation, montage: Political/Analytical deconstructionicon: heading The concept of alternative public quality: Video and media activism in the 1970s and 1980sicon: heading Media activismicon: heading Video as a medium of emancipation: From feminism to cyberfeminismicon: heading Post-colonial discourse, transculturality, translocal identitiesicon: heading Public space, media spaceicon: heading Politico-artistic activismicon: heading Net activismicon: heading From video surveillance to dataveillanceicon: heading Summary

ArtistsWorksSources
2146 Stones – Monument Against Racism
ATV Action
BIT PLANE
BorderXing Guide
Cadillac Ranch Show
Das Schweigen deutscher Räume erschreckt mich
Der Riese
Dirty Work for Slimey Girls
Don't Believe I'm an Amazon
Following Piece
Free Society
Global Groove
Homeless Vehicles
I Only Wish That I Could Weep
I thought I was seeing convicts
INSULAR Technologies
IO_dencies
Keep Your Chin Up!
Live-Taped Video Corridor
Logo on Black
Madame Cucumatz
Man with a Video Camera (Fuck Vertov)
Mayor Lindsay
Measures of Distance
Media Burn
Monodramas
Name.Space
Never my soul
News
Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation
On the Edge of Dreams
Partially Buried Continued
Picture Window Piece
Please love Austria!
Radical Software
Radio Free Utopia
Rape
Refugee Republic
Rio Videowall
Scham-Werk
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971
Society of spectacle
Space Surrogate I (Dubai)
Spin
TV Hijack
Tap and Touch cinema
Technologies To The People
Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman
Television Décollage
Television Spots
The Distance between Me and my Losses
The Duracell tape
The Electronic Revolution
The File Room
The New Embodied Sign Language
The Schleyer Tape
The Yes Men impersonate the WTO
Thin Cities
Time Delay Room
Triangle
Truisms
Turbulent
Two Undiscovered Amerindians
UCOG-144
VOPOS
Video Surveillance Piece
Voices from the Front – Testing the Limits
Welcome to Securityland
When the Wall approaches the Table
Yesterday / Today
Yuppie Ghetto with a Watchdog
ZaMir Transnational Net
Zygosis
[V]ote Auction
deportation.class
dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y
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makrolab
rolux