Since the 60s the »radical« arts have oscillated wildly in conflicts that emerged in the convergence of war protest, civil rights, and gender issues, and that have splintered into factions competing for media strategies form-fit to any number of agendas. The media, long misunderstood as an objective counterbalance between government policy, corporate (mis)conduct, and social mobilization, has itself become a zone of incorporated power enveloped in mega-mergers and, more and more, dominated by extreme agendas in the global sphere.
This aspect of globalization is crucial as a signifier of the extra-territorialization of the »information economy«, one that disperses accountability for social communication through filters whose hierarchies are well veiled but that perform in increasingly potent legal spheres where authority is decentralized and that is well legalized to create a Kafkaesque labyrinth (perhaps web is better) of elusive regulations and where all innocence could be understood as »ostensible«.
In this »new« global sphere, the internationalization of commerce pervades the »attention economy« in forms that promote both cultural homogenization (particularly in the eradication of localization in strategies of planetary »branding«) and in the superimposition of advertising into the body-politic (particularly in youth culture) where identification and marketing are more-and-more embedded in symbolic economies that approach omnipresence in logos, gadgets, fashion, advertising, even language.
In this compromised public sphere, long presumed neutral social space is transformed in an atmosphere deeply enveloped in the well-named »marketplace of ideas«. This »marketplace« is now dominated by forms of branding that corrupt the formation of civil, cultural space, a space now subsumed in communications that rupture the differences between public discourses and commercial messages. This is surely complicated by cultural strategies in which civil and cultural institutions themselves vie with commerce to »brand« themselves utilizing marketing techniques that compete in a perverse oscillation between citizen and consumer, culture and commerce, private and public. The regulation of this integrated post-public sphere suggests an imbalance in which critical communication is subject to normative policies that serve to sustain authorized—perhaps legalized is better—discourse with little or no regard for disagreement, opposition, or a re-legitimation of the public sphere as a zone of contestation, difference, otherness, dissension.
»The moment has arrived«, writes Armand Mattelart in Advertising International: The Privatisation of Public Space, »to ask not what culture can do in the face of the abuses of advertising and marketing, so much as what advertising and marketing have done to culture.« He continues: »As the risk of becoming ineffectual, no analysis, intervention can elude the question of the hegemony exercised by the pragmatics of marketing over the modern mode of communication … Because like it or not, commoditised space has become so pervasive that it becomes impossible to continue thinking of culture as a reserved and uncontaminated terrain.«
A social sphere deprived of its discursive role (a role now conveniently relegated to the flimsy agora of the world wide web) is sapped of its consequence and sundered of its potential. As an alternative arena for communication rather than an enclave for the staging of global brands (of all sorts), the public sphere demands immunity from the grim management of critical discourse to shield globalization’s populist agenda from legitimate debate.
Where else but in the still viable zones of art (and, in particular, public art) can one find the willingness to probe the omnipresent symbolic codes of contemporary culture. Too often confined in marginalized university seminars, studies of »media culture«, and isolated symposia, the investigation of the strangling effects of »new media« languish behind staggering campaigns to promote the dissolving of the borders of creativity and consumption. The past few decades of committed social art practice remind us that imagination’s specific relation to media is riddled with questions, doubts, and concerns. In formulating reactions, reflections, and interpretations of the reverberating effects of the economy of »brands«, the viability of technologies, the necessity for the gratifications of instant communication, the arts have provided an effective model of both reflection and resistance. To the normalizing consequences of an international media sphere, the arts have localized the issues, have attempted to unravel the fallacies, have poised themselves against the homogenization of the imaginary. To accomplish this, numerous strategies have developed.
On the one hand, it is facile to interpret the assimilation or usurpation of an incorporated symbolic atmosphere as subversive and against the principles of the mere ownership of propertied (or trademarked) icons or messages. On the other, it is crucial to understand the necessity and acknowledge the fundamental right to explode the narrow assumptions of marketing designed to foreclose discourse and limit legitimate discussion or criticism and to expose the possibilities that clearly reside in the schemes of multinationals to establish jurisdiction over creative discourse by restricting fair access to the use of content that is itself designed to invade the senses in a privatized public sphere in which it is immunized from criticism.
Mostly unsolicited, the bombardment of images, icons, advertising, etc. looms virally in public space and that seeps into every channel of communication. More and more, there is less and less space not conceptualized for the promotion of consumption. Corporate control of the public sphere has saturated—if not created—the post-historical condition. Grumbling when its precious messages or icons become subject to interpretation or subjected to criticism is disingenuous at the very least. In this system, »it requires some courage«, writes Armand Mattelart in his essay, Against Global Inevitability, »… to conceive of alternatives to the existing order and to persevere in raising the question of the democratisation of communication in all its ramifications.« There is little doubt that the authorities defending corporate properties are deeply rooted in social policies. Disavowing these systems in favor of a model that recognizes the reciprocal right to critique their ubiquity utilizing strategies that re-purpose them in reflective or critical frameworks is an absolutely crucial component of contemporary social discourse. The right to criticize demands an acknowledgement of the messages/intentions of your subject—whether they like it or not. Criticism is not merely the privilege of authority.
For more than a decade the work of the collective 0100101110101101.ORG has worked by intervening into the technical, social, information and communicative spheres in divergent forms, with the goal of demystifying systems. Their works expose frailties, form publics, explore agency and non-locality, reconsider presence, probe the issues of ownership, the right for information to be free. Their work provokes questions about the »other« side of the power, about the premises on which the culture is promoted (and, increasingly, regulated), and, now, about how corporate identity cannot endorse itself as a proxy public sphere or as an entity immune from the implications of their actions.
Itself »staged« in an undeniable act of serious irony, their NIKE INFOBOX, with its implicit iconic repetitions and proposed Swoosh sculpture, could not but raise the vexing spectre that this kind of intervention is no joke. That it could/will be interpreted as a cross between hijacking and promotion is parody at its most subversive.