Creative InsurgencyA sort of manifesto

A. Andreas 2007 [*]

Creative insurgency opposes established cultural domination.

Contrary to creative resistance, creative insurgency, aims to  overthrown and re-establish a new kind of creative order, in which  the might and prowess of the mainstream art world is definitively  pushed aside to make place for a more profound and human based  faculty of sharing and re-distributing objects of art and devotion.

 

Creative insurgency re-claims artŐs own, autonomous right to resist  and subvert societyŐs (mis) use of its idiomatic resources. Claims  currently made by designers, merchants, industrialists and the like.

 

One of the key debates among art officials, (inter)national cultural  experts and scholars concerns changes underway in the nature of  insurgency. "Classic" insurgencies sought to seize power and evolved  from underground and guerrilla forces. Contemporary insurgencies are  characterized by linkage to broader systemic conflicts or failures  normally involving networks as well as insurgents; by their use of  the Internet and other forms of information technology; by the need  to generate their own financial resources rather than relying on  external sponsors; and by the desire to create political "space" in  which to operate rather than the seizure of cultural power.

 

Cultural  forces are still struggling to understand contemporary  insurgencies and find ways to counter them. This is a common pattern  since insurgencies often take the form of "learning contests" between  insurgents and counterinsurgents.

 

Purposely taken the army as a metonym for the strategic and longtem  vision on how to achieve a given goal .i.e. to maintain or to  surplant a wanted regime, by the use of power, creative insurgency  uses in parallel the same theoretical foundations to achieve their  goals. i,e. the liberation of art from capital.

 

Again using the same army analogy, creative insurgency uses  massive global propaganda means to find sufficient mass for its  accomplishes. The widespread use of Internet, mailing lists, do it  yourself activities arise worldwide producing a critical body of  strongly motivated artists.

 

Modern life appears as a drowning man filming itself in its dead  struggle, the sight of  a drowning man filming his own drowning in a  world which as a whole is drowning is extremely absurd, there are  no  spectators to watch left. It is as if the act of filming replaces life itself . The residual of life is more life than life itself .  This scenery is really a last station, the complete artistically  epigraphical  swan song of mankind, filmed on a cell-phone by a  drowning man.

 

The act of seeing (active) gradually changing in the act of looking  (passive) is exactly what modern global capitalism is doing with  human mankind.. By replacing the means to create a life (rurality,  agriculture, self protecting, autartic societies) with the means to  earn a life( industries, labour, rent, mortgage, salary, funeral  insurance) the accent slowly drifts from the active sense to the  passive sense. Exemplified by the way internet developed  from a  research instrument to an entertainment device. In this process which  lasted a surprisenly short tem of about ten years, the presence of  the web turned from a small interesting peer to peer group to a huge  beast of milleniary proportions. The monster as the natural compagnon  of a gigantic destroyer. The spiderŐs web is an-eying the world , the  eye lost its vision and is multiplied inwardly on a enormous scale ,  blinded by its own image like the drowning men filming its own  drowning in a drowning world.

 

We are being reduced to garbage, we are the waste of existence, we  are the remnants of life zombificated by capitalistic power systems,  which more and more getting their feet into cultural practices. We  are the real living dead who ... are in all possible ways trying to  die. And on our way  feverelishy taken everyone with us. Every drop  of life is vampirized by these machinery.

 

Media labs everywhere , digital culture studies at every university ,  call for art works , call for proposals, call for papers, call for  citizen participations, all under the guiding eyes and financial  protection of govermental and institutional supervision. Our eyes are  subvisions , sub eyes, subordinated tentacles of the big tactic  monster disguised under number of names as freemarket, nato, unesco,  vn, gatt , g8, democracy, peoples republic, republic. Selling and  marketing ideologies, goods, idead, opinions, academic curiiculli  partaking in a rat race to compete , produce new, newer, hot hotter  and even more sexier, erotic ways to seduce the few reluctant  outsiders, to lost themselves in an overwhelming orgastic act of  suicidal auto eroticism . Our senses a mere reciprocal facility of  cooperative powers, disguised as democratic principles. Our bodies  submerged in even more and more artificial pseudo-avataric states as  Second Life, Sexual aid machineries penetrating our orifices with a  50 days guarantee.

 

Disengage, disgust, disembody, discourage, disgrace, dislike,  discourse, disintegrate, dissolve

 

A. Andreas 19 Dekemember 2007

Publication history:

rhizome.org raw list - US,
blackletter.ie - Ireland,
seecult.org - Serbia

Translation

Kreativni bunt kao oponent etabliranoj kulturnoj dominaciji , Serbian translation by Manik

Notes

[*] (re)written from several random internet sources.