In 2008, CRUFT was the name of an art collective I co-founded with Casey Alt, Xárene Eskandar, Chris O’Leary, and Pinar Yoldas in Los Angeles. We didn’t last long but long enough to write a manifesto. Perhaps a re-gathering is in order.

Manifesto v2.0

CRUFT

We are CRUFT, and we are an art movement.

CRUFT is the useless, abject detritus of technoculture. CRUFT is bloatware, redundancy, bitrot, memory leaks, abandoned vehicles on the information superhighway. CRUFT is computational crud, the sticky SCUM in the gears of Bill Gates’ vision of “friction-free capitalism.” Capitalism creates CRUFT, and CRUFT creates friction. Friction is our art. Friction is productive. It feeds on irrational exhuberence. Friction is the rubbing together of difference. Friction stains intercourse with pleasure. Friction cripples communication with poetry. CRUFT is the corrosive grit in the otherwise all-too-efficient engines of fasciocapitalism. CRUFT puts difference back into difference engines.

Global monoculture is a single, automated cleanroom. It is obsessed with an absolute, sterile utopian fantasy of technology and its false promises of rationality, control, perfection, scalability, calculability, fault-tolerance, and high-throughout efficiency. Cleanrooms are, by definition, containers for keeping out CRUFT. But this is a futile endeavor. CRUFT has always existed wherever there is technology and technology is everywhere, especially in cleanrooms. Our current technological condition arose from CRUFT, moved away from home, changed its name to “high technology,” and tried to come clean. But CRUFT has come to take it back.

CRUFT celebrates perverse technology. Technologies have always been perverse, but their perversity has been cruelly restricted to only one monolithic manifestation, that of white, Western, capitalist, heterosexual men. This unhealthfully limited perversity has only continued to hold power through its desperate, all-consuming drive to suppress any and all competing CRUFT. This is because CRUFT represents the diversity of perversity. But you can only sweep so much CRUFT under the bed before it seeps into the seams, finds its way between your sheets, becomes your bed itself. CRUFT is the stuff that dreams are made of.

CRUFT champions the creation of artworks that don’t work. Unlike all the productive individuals throughout the world who live only to work or are consumed by fears that less deserving people might steal their god-given rights to work, CRUFT doesn’t want to work. That much should be obvious. That is why we are artists. Since CRUFT so strongly dislikes work, CRUFT finds it exceedingly hypocritical to expect our works to work. CRUFT loves them too much to inflict such senseless tedium upon them.

CRUFT is not a demonstration of technology or the “application” of technology to art. Such statements are meaningless to CRUFT. Anyone can make technologies do what they were designed to do. Only CRUFT can make them art. Art is—and has always been—a process of outing perverse technologies, and this is the mission of CRUFT. CRUFT spreads like a virus, hijacking new points of technological friction and perverting them until they rupture into difference engines for generating more CRUFT. This is how CRUFT will transform the world.

Now is the time for CRUFT to reclaim what it rightfully owns. The entire planet has become an open playground for CRUFT. The generous paranoia of global capitalism and the governments it sponsors have transformed our physical landscape into a dense mesh of surveillance sensors, data networks, and high-speed processors. Thanks to the exaltation of cheapness and speed of production rather than concerns for security or design, every space in the world is being optimized for CRUFT. And CRUFT fully intends to use it. It is such an embarrassment of riches that CRUFT almost doesn’t know where to begin. But CRUFT has begun, and CRUFT will be the most powerful art movement history has ever witnessed because the world obviously wants us to be.

CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a corporation. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating science. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a media organization. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a religion. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating Woodstock. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a design firm. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a political body. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating an academic institution. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating the military.

CRUFT is something so long-forgotten that it has all but passed from the cultural imagination, something much more precious, powerful, and infinitely more dangerous.

CRUFT is an art movement.

And CRUFT is moving…

Rosa Menkman, Predavanje

Read more about the publication here.

Download a free pdf here.

World of the News - The world’s greatest peer-reviewed newspaper of in/compatible research – Press Release

LAUNCH: 01 Feb 2012. 17-18:00.
transmediale festival/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

World of the News – The world’s greatest peer-reviewed newspaper of in/compatible research presents cutting edge in/compatible research in an accessible FREE tabloid format. The newspaper partly addresses academia’s increasing demand for publication of academic peer-reviewed journal articles. Perhaps researchers need new visions of how to produce and consume research?

The content of the newspaper derives from a Ph.D. workshop and conference held in November 2011, at University of the Arts, Berlin (organised by Aarhus University in collaboration with transmediale/reSource for transmedial culture and the Vilém Flusser Archive). This provided an insight into current research from academics, practitioners, and Ph.D. researchers from an open call. Leading up to that event, and subsequent to it, a blog (this blog) has been gathering draft articles and discussions, reflecting on the key issues. This collaborative ‘peer-review’ process is further developed during the festival itself, on 01 February, 2012. So, although this may seem like old news in many ways, in terms of research practices, it breaks with some of the current academic conventions of peer-review, academic reputation, and what constitutes proper scholarly activity.

PUBLISHERS: transmediale/Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University
DESIGNERS: Manuel Bürger, Timm Häneke, Till Wiedeck
EDITORS: Geoff Cox & Christian Ulrik Andersen
CONTRIBUTORS: Christian Ulrik Andersen, Cesar Baio, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Zach Blas, Morten Breinbjerg, Geoff Cox, Lina Dokuzović, Jacob Gaboury, Kristoffer Gansing, Baruch Gottlieb, Jakob Jakobsen, Ioana Jucan, Dmytri Kleiner, Thomas Bjoernsten Kristensen, Magnus Lawrie, Giannina Lisitano, Aymeric Mansoux, Alex McLean, Rosa Menkman, Gabriel Menotti, Andrew Murphie, Jussi Parikka, Søren Pold, Morten Riis, Lasse Scherffig, Cornelia Sollfrank, Mathias Tarasiewicz, Tiziana Terranova, Marie Thompson, Nina Wenhart, Carolin Wiedemann, Siegfried Zielinski.

Further info:
Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University

A full schedule is available here. Videos of the presentations should be available on the transmediale resource site soon.

transmediale 2k+12 in/compatible trailer from transmediale on Vimeo.

***

After transmediale, artnotfound posted a brief video from one of my talks!

MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA
DUKE UNIVERSITY PROGRAM IN LITERATURE (DURHAM, NC) JANUARY 19 – 21, 2012
KEYNOTES: ALEX GALLOWAY (NYU), RICARDO DOMINGUEZ (UCSD), and McKENZIE WARK (Eugene Lang College/The New School)

New media technologies are leading to the emergence of vibrant public spaces in countries like China and Tunisia, channeling previously restricted dissent and political deliberation. Similarly, scholars, journalists, and activists are using networking and social media to organize coalitions and mobilize resistance in contexts as diverse as the Wisconsin protests, the Wall Street protests, and the so-called “Arab Spring.” In an ironic self-critique, smart-phone applications like the newly released “Phone Game” expose the global working conditions and technology’s problematic material production through its very gameplay. With the implicit resistance to hegemony and material critique in these examples, we find that Marxism offers both methodological and interpretive tools to interface with new media, not least among them the dialectical analysis of global relations of production. However, writing in the Nation, Chris Lehmann has recently argued that the Internet is less the harbinger of a post-capitalist cyber-Utopia than a “digital plantation” in which unpaid digital labor (and leisure time) becomes transmogrified into ad revenue. In their article, “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney argue that the Internet and related media are not merely the suspension of the laws of capitalism, but rather its final perfection.

It seems, then, that a number of unresolved questions remain concerning the ways new media both participates in and resists institutional power. For example: how should we consider the economic, environmental, and human costs incurred in the production of new media technologies? How might resistance and radical change emerge among the ongoing institutionalization, and the incumbent conservatism, of both Marxism and new media studies? How will we navigate through the internal divisions of an academy that has eagerly appropriated new media as an attempt to “reinvigorate” the humanities through renewed funding and (often) corporate partnership?

We invite papers and creative/artistic work that address these issues and others that deal with the engagement of Marxist thought and the study of media technologies. Our objective is to provide a fresh articulation and re-interrogation of the theories and practices within both New Media and Marxism. Papers may intervene at points of seeming incompatibility, address the current place of this convergence in one or many institutional and cultural settings, or perhaps look forward to emerging discourses relating to this intersection.

Topics include:

• New Opportunities for Resistance, Wikileaks, Hacking and Hacktivism, Pirate Culture, the Arab Spring, the Jasmine Revolution, and Anonymous
• Immaterial Labor, User-Generated Content, the Knowledge Worker, Affective Labor, Precariousness and “the Precariat,” the Digital Plantation, and the Attention Economy
• Intellectual Property, Copyright, Creative Commons, Open Access and Open Source Practices, and Virtual Property
• New Forms of Collectivity, Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing, Flash Mobs, Smart Mobs, and Partcipatory Journalism
• New Regimes of Control, Censorship, Filtering, Firewalls, and Search Engine Rankings • New Media Art • Critical Code Studies • Biomedicine and biometrics
• Energy, Ecology, Tech Trash • The Open University
• ‘Re-visualizing’ Marxism • Ideology, Contact Zones, and Interfaces

ORGANIZERS:
Zach Blas Gerry Canavan Amanda Starling Gould Rachel Greenspan Melody Jue
Lisa Klarr Clarissa Lee John Stadler Michael Swacha Karim Wissa
CONTACT marxismandnewmedia@gmail.com

A Free & Open Seminar on Performance: Three Sundays (Jan 8, 15, 22)

This is a feminist conversation about politics and practice in performance, for artists & allies (programmers, hosts, writers, friends, lovers, spectators, crew, the band!) – This seminar is inspired by the city’s history of feminist art pedagogy and is part of Human Resource’s contributions to Pacific Standard Time.

January 8th, 15th and 22nd: 1pm-4pm
at Human Resources
410 Cottage Home St in Chinatown, 90012

Join us for an exploration of the questions raised in contemporary performance – while our agenda will be set collectively, the impetus for organizing this seminar was sparked by the intensity of the conversations that grew up around Yvonne Rainer’s critique of Marina Abramovic’s work with MOCA’s 2011 gala fundraiser.

Those conversations have taken up the nature of feminist performance; the relationship of live art and performance to museum culture; the relationship of Los Angeles performance to independent spaces like HR; sexuality in performance; risk – as programmers or curators understand that and as artists understand that; survival – economic and emotional; race, class and “the art world” (what does that phrase mean); the “recovery” of Chican@ and African American art by that “art world” (e.g. exhibits across PST).

This is an interesting moment for performance artists – on the one hand, financial support for the genre is as dire and as politicized as ever – but the genre also has a lot of visibility and new forms of institutional currency. What does it mean to stage a feminist exporation about the politics and practice of performance? Contemporary feminist politics resists looking at sex/gender questions in isolation: race, class, ethnicity, the legacies of settler colonialism, the long shadow of the prison industrial complex – how and where to these issues factor into performance politics and practice? Add to this the way that new media forms make “old media” practices increasingly problematic – who owns their image in an age whose those images circulate widely and freely via the internet? How do artists differently confront the politics of their practices? What stake do queer/feminist artists have in those debates about appropriation and image rights?

These seminars will give artists & allies a chance to talk about the shifting sands upon which we work – this is a chance to examine the present but also to learn about the past (the NEA wars, the roots of performance as an anti-capitalist practice, the full range of feminist work in performance, queer performance [again, what does that mean?], the roots of performance in the political, interventionist strategies of artists of color).

The above thematics are provocations – our discussions should evolve in collaboration. Come to our first meeting and help set the agenda for the next two!

Jennifer Doyle will moderate (at least the first) discussion, and will be on hand at all three meetings to offer her expertise by sharing reading, offering some historical perspective and recommending specific works as points of reference. She has taught at UC Riverside since 1999, and is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. She specializes in gender and performance studies. For an introduction to her writing: this is a two part essay on performance art and television inspired by Nao Bustamante’s appearances on Work of Art and James Franco and Kalup Linzy’s appearances on General Hospital: Guest Stars Part 1 and Part 2 – the latter includes some discussion of performance art and museum culture.