Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathSociety

Visual Summary

preview imagepreview imagepreview imagepreview imagepreview image

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