<nettime> Wiki Curatorial Statements - How do you TURN*ON an Insurrection?

["micha cardenas / azdel slade" <azdelslade@gmail.com>]

We've decided that it would be far more in the participatory spirit of
TURN*ON if we post our curatorial statements in a wiki, publicly editable.
Click the link to read both of them and feel free to add, edit, or
contribute as you see fit!

How to TURN*ON an Insurrection?  and   What is TURN*ON?

http://bang.calit2.net/wiki/Towards_a_curatorial_statement
How to TURN*ON an Insurrection?

Our main drive in selecting the work/play to be included in this edition of
artivistic has been a deep desire to TURN*ON everyone, ourselves, the
participants, the audience, the city, the world(s). We are mostly interested
in _unleashing energy_ that might be used for creating new worlds. We are
less interested in critique that closes off avenues of thinking and more
interested in connections which destroy limits. As Jack Waters and Peter
Cramer state, their event is an "OVERLOAD of sensory mayhem in their
collaborative performance" aimed at "the release of unknown realms and
indulgences." We are less interested in a pure democratic space of dialog
than in a situated, embodied, sweaty exchange where the participants at the
table are all equally implicated and stimulated. We can't waste the
opportunity provided by economic collapse. Faced with a crumbling neoliberal
system, we want to make out with possibility and find new spaces of creation
in-between realities.

TURN*ON has been driven by a desire to engage, to create engagements and to
expand participation beyond acceptable proportions. The projects selected by
the Artivistic collective were selected primarily on how well they might
spur action and create unexpected explosions. Beyond asking for artwork, we
have called for and tried to organize events which include multiple
dimensions of activity and multiple registers of engagement, resonating on
political, aesthetic and erotic dimensions at once.

Throughout the oganizing and promotion of the event, we have striven to
emphasize that artivistic is an _event_, not a festival, not a conference.
We have attempted to decentralize the decision making and organizing of this
event as much as possible through infraCrews which volunteers may join to
deal with different aspects of the working of the event, and have tried to
make our financial work transparent with our p2p funding efforts. Our hope
is to foster new configurations of exchange outside of the traditional
formats of panels and exhibitions, in order to release new trajectories by
breaking with old habits.

More than anything, the event has been inspired by the artists and
communities who are participating in Artivistic. Our hope, as organizers, is
that the intense energies present in the movements around gender and
sexuality may be modulated, brought together and amplified through our
event. Both the political struggles and the personal passions over these
issues are so strong. We have tried to create a roving, expansive network of
activities, online and offline, which we hope will reach beyond the confines
of the dates of the event. It could be thought of as a war machine, but
perhaps we've had enough war and we want something more like a love machine,
that breaks down by binding and reconfigures relationality along new
configurations. Or perhaps we've had enough of machines and want a love
organism with many arms, an erotic squid. In Pornopticon's mole tunnels, we
can see the kind of rhizomatic burrows we strive for. One can also think of
the comfortable den of an animal as a warm safe space, and we realize that
people need to feel supported and safe before they can open up to be turned
on, and we are stiving towards that as well.

The kind of politics you will find at Artivistic is perhaps a less
traditional one of social movements, mass gatherings and lobbying publics
and politicians. It is more a politics of daily life, a biopolitics that
starts with where our bodies are now and what our bodies want. Again, it is
a politics concerned less with the static defense of oppositional positions
than with creating and opening possibilities, connections, spaces. Our hope
is that we might find a magical configuration of energies, perhaps with the
help of the H3X3N computer witchcraft club, that will unleash an overflow of
fluid genders and sexualities into the city, turning on an insurrection,
joining with bodies in rebellion throughout the intergalactic.

The world to come is so sexy and the month to come is so sexy. Thank you for
inspiring us already. We are so excited to get started. See you in October.

-- 
micha cárdenas / azdel slade

Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab, http://experimentalgamelab.net
Calit2 Researcher, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org





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