Strategies for Post-Digital Subversion

What happened to the technoutopian dream of the 90s?

According to technologists and cyberfeminists of the time, the internet was supposed to make everything better. The removal of barriers, of identities, of physicalities, was supposed to bring us to a grander civilization, to a communal humanity on the integrated circuit. Now it has become corporatized, Web 2.0'd, driven by the extraction of wealth from categorization and commoditization of its users and the data they generate. The practice of "having an identity on the internet" now seems more for the benefit of state and corporate actors who want to surveil and data mine than it does is for the user.

This talk will review a variety of contemporary media artist strategies for subverting the current working order of the internet and the digital systems of oppression that underly it, and then open into a group discussion of ways of incorporating those strategies into our own work. Many art critics label works incorporating these strategies as "post-digital art" and we will also address the appropriateness of this term. This session is appropriate for anyone making creative work who feels that the network technologies of the internet empower oppressive power structures as much as they empower the users of those technologies.