[NetBehaviour] BOOK: Creating Insecurity: art and cultur

[Olga]

Creating Insecurity: art and culture in the age of security
edited by Wolfgang Sützl & Geoff Cox

contributors:
Giorgio Agamben | Konrad Becker | Bureau of Inverse Technology | Geoff
Cox | Florian Cramer | glorious ninth | Brian Holmes | carlos
katastrofsky | Martin Knahl | Norbert Koppensteiner | Daniela Ingruber
| The Institute for Applied Autonomy | Naeem Mohaiemen | Mukul Patel |
Luis Silva | Wolfgang Sützl | Tiziana Terranova | McKenzie Wark


'Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the
thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of
politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the
state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state
activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of
public administration until the first half of the twentieth century,
now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought
of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as
its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can
always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terrorist.'

Following the words of Giorgio Agamben (from his 2001 article 'On
Security and Terror'), security has become the basic principle of
international politics after 9/11, and the 'sole criterion of
political legitimation'. But security – reducing plural, spontaneous
and surprising phenomena to a level of calculability – also seems to
operate against a political legitimacy based on possibilities of
dissent, and stands in clear opposition to artistic creativity. Being
uncalculable by nature, art is often incompatible with the demands of
security and consequently viewed as a 'risk', leading to the arrest of
artists, and a neutralisation of innovative environments for the sake
of security.

Yet precisely the position of art outside the calculable seems to
bring about a new politicisation of art, and some speak of art as
'politics by other means'. Has art become the last remaining enclave
of a critique of violence? Yet how 'risky' can art be?

The contributors to DATA browser 04: CREATING INSECURITY address these
questions at the intersection of art, technology, and politics.


http://www.data-browser.net/04/

-- 
Olga P Massanet
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