[artinfo] MANUFACTURING DISSENT

[Milo” VOJTùCHOVSK¯]

MANUFACTURING DISSENT

Prague Microfestival/MicroLab Critical encounters25-27 MAY, 
VENU·E VE ·VEHLOVCE, SLAVÍKOVA 22, PRAGUE
Alienist magazine & the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of 
the Mai 68 Paris Student Uprising & the PraÏské 
Jaro (1968 Prague Spring), Prague 
Microfestival/MicroLab in conjunction with 
Alienist magazine & the Centre for Critical & 
Cultural Theory * will host a series of critical 
encounters between artists, activists & theorists 
on the appropriations & reinventions of the idea 
of dissent. Confronted by the virtual 
criminalization of protest in many socalled 
Western democracies * by rampant commodification 
& the normalization of dissent within the culture 
industry * & by the bold resurgence of 
neo-fascism inside the political mainstream, what 
forms can active resistance take? And is there a 
future for the *avantgarde*?

Digital space has allowed humans to communicate 
at staggering speed, while at the same time 
allowing for virtually instant reappropriation by 
the respective rightsholders. Service providers 
trawl and sift through Big Data in order to sell 
them to the highest bidder, making information 
one of the most prized commodities on the market. 
This allows the standing power structures to 
interface with the polis on their own terms. As 
the future blockchains itself into existence, 
informational monopoly constitutes a new type of 
threat for the global semiosphere. With great 
computational power however comes great 
responsibility.

In the words of McKenzie Wark, *Information wants 
to be free but is everywhere in chains.* This is 
a maxim which applies double to endlessly 
reproducible and readily transferable digitized 
content which truly has nothing but its chains to 
lose. Powers formerly associated with the 
traditional Right and Left camps, from 
multinational corporations to self-styled social 
justice warriors, have their informers and their 
agents provocateurs as much as they have their
discontents: Aaron Swartz, Jordan B. Peterson, 
Alexandra Elbakyan, Edward Snowden, Julian 
Assange * these are some of the unlikely 
dissidents of the digital age. In standard 
parlance, *the hack* has become ubiquitous as a 
gesture of resistance, but how to give it the 
cutting edge in the realm of natural language? 

Manufacturing Dissent will aim to address the following questions:

How to chart out and navigate new registers of 
public discourse which would not be complicit in 
neither censorship nor utilitarian sophistry, and 
would open the sphere of the political in ways 
heretofore unimagined?

How to transcode language beyond its normative 
register, and carve out an alien poetics which 
would not be cowed and herded back within the
confines of a ready-made, prefabricated political discourse? 

Who arbiters what is and is not acceptable to 
say, and what are their motivations?

How do digital technologies, with their Likes, 
emoticons, and encoded frameworks of gates and 
passcodes, condition the understanding of
politics and an individual*s relationship to their environment? 

Luis Armand & Vít Bohal


<https://alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/manufacturing-dissent/#more-307>https://alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/manufacturing-dissent/#more-307


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