Think Tanks

Since Zach mentioned it, here's the original think tank post in all its verbose glory:

As I've been thinking about ideas since last week, I started to notice that every idea I came up with was primarily reducible to a negative critique of some aspect of the protest or some aspect of the current administration or mass media, etc. Many of ideas were sarcastic and snarky, in a sort of "look how enlightened and witty I am — look how ignorant and rigid you are" kind of logic. At first I thought that this might be appropriate for the action, but the more I thought about it the more it bothered me because all my ideas just felt overly negative, simplistic, and derivative. Many ideas were easily reducible to one-liners that often amounted to just making fun of some opposing target.

I finally identified that what depresses me so much about this approach is that it basically only serves to reinforce what is perhaps the biggest problem of our current political climate: the fact that there are such readily proscribed and intentionally polarizing scripts for how to make a statement. Conservatives do what they do, and liberals usually do one of two things: angrily rage against the machine (protest) or mock the opposition and snicker secretly to one another (satire), both to little effect. Both of these are oppositional in their logic, and both of them only reinforce an attitude of containment.

In thinking of how to possibly undo this, I began to think about what the extreme expression of political containment might be, and I eventually arrived at the concept of the "think tank." At the literal level, a think tank "contains" thought, not just in the sense of "holding" it but also in the sense of "restricting" or "limiting" it. Think tanks are isolated, hidden and secret bunkers. They are the opposite of public, democratic discourse. They are elitist and selective. How the hell does one even become a member of a think tank? What are their credentials? Think tanks are often politically homogeneous and self-reinforcing: everyone in a think tank already seems to be of the same opinion, as in a "conservative think tank," that's how they get invited in the first place. As such, they have nothing to do with the discovery or creation of new intellectual possibilities but rather seek to narrowly restrict thought. Their only products are "studies" that add no new knowledge to the world, but rather only serve to replicate and proliferate the opinions of those already in power. Often, these "studies" hold a ridiculous amount of sway in public policy, though no one really seems to know why because none of us really understand what a think tank is. Almost all of their power lies in their inaccessibility and mystery. As such, they are basically extremely influential mechanisms for reinforcing the status quo and foreclosing on the option for any real productive, public, political discourse. The measure of their success lies in how effectively they segregate all of us into disconnected, disenfranchized, passive, unthinking, individual entities. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that almost everything I disliked about the current political climate was embodied in the notion of the think tank.

So, what to do about it? I began to wonder if there were any fun and playful solutions for subverting the concept's meaning and authority. The most obvious was to reinterpret it in some way: to intentionally misuse it and thereby steal its power. I began to think of "tank" in the sense of a military tank: a heavily armored, mobile weapon with lots of fire power. According to that reading, what then would a "think tank" be? Perhaps, a think tank is a mobile weapon for shocking people into really thinking — a self-contained entity that could break away from overly entrenched battlefield positions and make clever tactical victories. Since this seems directly relevant to the problem of political polarization and entrenchment, I grew to like this interpretation a lot and felt that it might have some potential as a conceptual engine.

I then tried to relate this back to the protest, and I thought how cool it might be if we manifested this concept in some material fashion by each of us creating his or her own individual "think tank," whatever that might be. Not only does this hijack the concept for our own creative reinterpretation, but it also draws an explicit connection between the products of political think tanks and their very real military consequences. What would our individual think tanks look like? I have no idea. I think they should take whatever shape, form, meaning, medium each person thinks might be most effective in shocking others into thinking in a new way.

That being said, I also feel as though some basic rules might help:

• Each think tank should be mobile — because, well, tanks are mobile, and for good reason: so as to better keep on the move around the crowd and maximize potency

• All think tanks should have some common insignia so that people can understand that we're a collective body. The project doesn't really make sense unless people get the idea that we're a multiplicity, even though each think tank would undoubtedly and hopefully be an individual expression. Maybe something as simple as the words "CRUFT" and/or "THINK TANK!" on each think tank is all we need.

• As a complement to the last point, all think tanks should move together in a loose formation.

• Each think tank's payload should be viral, meaning that the mission of the think tank is to shock others into creating their own think tanks.

Perhaps someone's think tank is just to walk around naked (except for our identifying logo?) in a public space. Maybe someone else hands out thought-provoking literature. Another might be a physical model of a tank that has pictures of Gandhi, MLK, etc. as armored plates and blares "Give Peace a Chance" out of its main cannon. I have no idea. Chris had the great idea of wearing a suit and walking around with a backpack full of letter stencils, T-shirts, and cans of spray paint and encouraging people to make up their own wearable propaganda or allowing you to write a message on them. No matter what we come up with, I think the net effect would be fun, engaging, carnivalesque and positive, positive in the sense of creating freakishly new options for social engagement.

As a larger point, I am increasingly enamored by this notion of CRUFT becoming a positive catalyst in which real social movement can happen through playfully irreverent (and therefore powerfully critical and contagious) means. Part of what got me on this whole tangent in the first place was that I was reading Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus this morning and came across a preface by Foucault I realized I'd never read before, in which Foucault eloquently summarizes the theme of the book in about 3 pages as a field manual for resisting facism. Foucault outlined "a certain number of essential principles" necessary "to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life." I like them so much and feel they're so central to CRUFT and this project idea, that I'm going to waste even more of your time by reproducing them here:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

• Do not think one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individuation.

• Do not become enamored of power.

methodology from Vx talk

Okay, so here's the intro I used for my VacilLogix work during my Duke talk (as referenced in my long-ass comment to Zach) on methodology. Hopefully, it's useful:

In facing that eternal question of what to make next, I knew that I wanted to begin doing work with more teeth — something that really brought my longstanding theoretical interests in interface, power, and culture to bear more strongly upon my artistic practice. More, specifically, I wanted to focus on what is commonly called "media arts" and its seemingly unseverable umbilical connection to that now-ubiquitous cloud of slippery systems theory known as "the New Economy."

On the one hand, I knew this umbilical connection between media arts and the New Economy provided an open conduit for powerful attack. Yet, at the same time, I'd given up on conventional modes of cultural critique. I was no longer content to traffic in recycled negativity. I wanted to avoid all the convenient artificial binaries that have polarized and paralyzed public discourse. I wanted to move beyond parody, satire, and all the prevailing tendencies of distanced, overly simplistic, and ineffectual criticism to something more productive, positive, and transformative.

But how does one transform a system from within that system? I remembered that no one had grappled with that question more effectively than Deleuze, and, so, once again, I returned to his writings and was reminded that resistance to capitalism isn't resistance at all, rather opposition is necessary to capitalism, an inherent part of its logic. And I was reminded that capitalism isn't the enemy of change, rather capitalism is change, it is revolution, it is radicality. And I began to be more convinced that the real way to make a difference wasn't to vainly attempt to resist or subvert the technolibertarian, systems theory-based, free market extremism of the New Economy, but rather to ride it, couple with it, accelerate it, amplify it, make it monstrous — a methodology Deleuze puckishly called enculage in describing his own early work:

"My book on Kant is different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs ... But I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery (enculage) ... I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." (Negotiations, 6)

And so, I let go of my smug artistic attachments, surrendered to the pull of the current, flowed through that umbilical conduit, and entered into the New Economy, became incorporated, shared myself with it, lost myself in it, came to learn its secrets, loved it intimately from the inside.

And, suddenly, everything came together, self-assembled into a single, cohesive, dynamic, new vision. Everything finally computed. [cue Vx video]

Don't Tase Me Bro!!

Something I’ve been following for a few years now is the increased usage of Tasers by police officers against unarmed, and at times totally innocent civilians. This disturbing trend has lead to deaths. This story involved a police officer killing an unarmed, mentally ill man with a taser, who goes on to kill himself.

People are being tased at traffic stops. In University Libraries, and political forums.

Though some of these events have had consequences for the authorities, in general they don’t. Unfortunately this is a DAILY event, all over the country, and authorities are protected by the Patriot Act.

The implications are terrifying to our personal safety and civil rights. Should we really have to fear a taser to the gut if we disagree with a police officer at a traffic stop?

There are a few ways we could react to this issue. One, though dangerous, could be to hack, or modify a taser for some subversive purpose. Obviously we would have to do a lot of research to know what we were doing, but I like the concept hypothetically. The act of "Tasing" is a strange performative concept that could be explored in myriad ways. The whole notion of Non-Lethal weapons is interesting too.
It could go a lot of different ways. What do you guys think?

sharing (2)

and just when you thought i'd given you enough to read, i'm also posting the introduction to my more official academic rendering of gay bombs:


Gay Bombs: Exploding Topologies of Queerness

On January 15, 2005, BBC News published an article entitled “US military pondered love not war.” In this news brief, US Air Force research for the now supposedly defunct development of a “gay bomb” was announced to the public. Proposed in 1994 at the Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, the gay bomb is defined as an aphrodisiac chemical that “would make enemy soldiers ‘sexually irresistible’ to each other.” Indeed, the gay bomb, which was designed to be a six-year development project costing $7.5 million, “would provoke widespread homosexual behavior among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.” That the gay bomb would explode into immorality, detonating a public shaming upon its victims, pre-supposes rampant homophobia, for the act of homosexual sex in and of itself does not promise defeat or surrender. Yet, given the US military’s conflation of gay (here, defined as homosexual sex) with weapon, it seems that the military pondered war not love. Indeed, the image chosen to accompany this text of a military aircraft dropping dozens of missiles assures us that this bomb is a loveless act of sovereign dominance and destruction.
Perhaps more importantly than its sketchy exegesis of the gay bomb, the BBC News article encapsulates all the contradictions that have come to be embodied within medial representations of this military proposal. As BBC shifts between the use of “gay bomb” and “love bomb” freely, suggesting that these two descriptors are equally suitable for what the military has proposed, the conflation of the performance of a sexual act with “love” confuses and displaces how “gay” operates to signify “bomb.” The production of love as a result of the gay bomb’s detonation reads as a failure: the military wants homosexual sex to shame and disgrace—love remains absent from this plan. Still more perplexing is BBC’s use of citations, identifying “gay bomb,” “love bomb,” and “sexually irresistible” in the text to be directly extracted from military documents. Yet, as I will discuss later, this is not the case for any of these quotations. These citations that the BBC implement as definitions present a conflicting gap between the military’s allusive textual explication of this weapon as a “strong aphrodisiac” and BBC’s rhetorical move to visualize this text within the materiality of a bomb, seen here in the image of bombs released from a military aircraft. In turn, the BBC article coupled with the military proposal network the homosexual within grids of relationality that connect gay, love, weapon, bomb, and explosion. In fact, this new topology of relations that the homosexual is interpolated into maps a genealogy of what has come to be known as the gay bomb in visual culture, dialectically located, I will argue, within a love bomb, or queer bomb, and a war bomb, or a military-media bomb. Unlike BBC’s implication, love and war here are found to explode in two very different ways.
This paper reads the 1994 US Air Force document “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘Bad Guy’ Identifying Chemicals” in which the military proposes the development of a chemical weapon to enact homosexual behavior on combatants of war, through four visualizations of the gay bomb. These visualizations fall into two separate timeframes, divided by the release of the military document. While today medial representations of the gay bomb proliferate in popular culture on YouTube music videos, television shows, and movie spoofs, this contemporary union of homosexuality and bomb return us to another type of gay bomb that has existed in queer culture, a bomb that does not use homosexuality as a weapon of shame but rather explodes queer existence and affect into the world. This queer bomb of the past unites homosexuals with the threat—or at the moment of—explosion. Historically, the homosexual has built a gay bomb but is now blown up by another.
After an analysis of the military document, I will discuss two current representations of the gay bomb: 1) the 2001 online proliferation of an image of the USS Enterprise GBU-31 that was de-faced with the tag “High Jack This Fags” (and later dropped on Afghanistan), and 2) the gay bomb’s 2008 appearance on the television show 30 Rock. Next, I will turn to two older examples of the queer bomb (or love bomb): 1) the “No Future!” bombing in the 1977 film Jubilee of a heterosexual couple’s house by a queer punk, 2) the playful bomb-as-beach-ball in The Smith’s 1986 music video Ask. I will ask how current formations of the gay bomb affect our readings and interpretations of these older visualizations that notably did not embody the words “gay bomb” in their visuality and were not necessarily subordinated to military power. Specifically, how did the military document, which never mentions a “gay bomb,” produce an explosion of gay bombs in contemporary media, and in turn, how does this shape our reflections upon queer bombs?
The dialectic of the gay bomb poses a complex positionality of homosexual existence and agency, for before and after the US military proposal, the gay bomb aims toward different targets, and the directionalities of those aims are controlled by different forces. As I inquire into the ways the homosexual targets and is targeted, I will use a topological framework to analyze these networked grids of warfare that the homosexual has become inextricably encrypted within. A network topology is the mapping of elements in a network, including the physical connections between points and the logistical flows of data between these nodes. As military applications most commonly use a full mesh topology that provides direct links to all nodes in the network, I will employ such a topology to structure my analysis of the gay bomb. The gay bomb—a military application, a full mesh topology, a decentralized network—fuses, in a radical horizontality, to warfare, weaponry, and mass destruction as well as queer affect, community, and love. To parse the homosexual’s node(s) in this topology, a discursive interrogation must be executed, asking how the gay bomb restructures the logic of the homosexual, that is, what data does the gay bomb explode into the ontological formation of the homosexual, as well as how the gay bomb re-wires the quality of the homosexual’s interactions within this topology.
Samuel Weber notes that each target is positioned to exploit an opportunity. With the rise of what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism, the gay bomb takes as its opportunity the enfolding of homonormativity into mainstream culture to include the homosexual into the construction of its own exclusion and effacement. While representations of the gay bomb in popular culture are at times applauded and enjoyed by homosexuals, the gay bomb always takes the opportunity to mark the homosexual not as target but as target-already-hit. If, in the past, queer communities “learned to stop worrying and love the bomb,” they did so through embracing their positionality as target and took this as an opportunity to target back (become the bomb) and establish community and its production of love on the basis of imminent explosion.
If the bomb is always a target that aims to manipulate—as its opportunity—network topologies that are links between bodies, weapons, life, death, power, and subordination, I would like to conclude this paper with a consideration of the productive possibilities that the gay bomb might still have for queer as well as GLBTI communities in general. If the queer bomb of the past internalizes an explosion predicated on the historically specific risks of HIV/AIDS, gay bashing, closetedness, and general societal exclusion, all of these threats still remain painfully present and unrelentingly intensified. Has the externalization of this bomb—a production outside of queerness and into the mainstream, within and beyond homosexuality—eclipsed the performative power the bomb once held? Or can the gay bomb explode once again, with the weight of its history, as a political tactic to unite those it embodies as well as those it aims to destroy, in love?

sharing (1)

i think it's important that we continuously share what we're working on / thinking about here. our own practices and research will inevitably shape the work of the group. that said, i'm going to post an abstract below for a paper i'm working on...so you all can see what i'm thinking about these days.


Interfacing Enmity: Faces and the Tactics of Nonexistence

This paper questions the power and abilities of faces in media to perform in various political conflicts. If the face is an interface of enmity, I will ask what types of faces can successfully mobilize against sovereignty and what excludes other faces from such actions.

In the cinema, the close-up of the face has been suggested to offer its viewers a depth into humanity, a so-called warmth constituted by the image’s humanness. Surely, we project this reading of depth and humanness onto the image, for the cinematographic image is flat and the faces it depicts are only surfaces, maps to be read any which way. It is the way we read the surface of the face that brings us toward some type of depth. In an age of ubiquitous digital surveillance culture, representations of the face deliver its promise as surface to the sovereign power that uses the surface of the face to map, match, capture, and secure patterns: facial analysis of video surveillance footage, eigenface research and simulation, facial and retinal recognition laser scans, not to mention the proliferations of passport photos, mug shots, and photo ID cards.

The exposed face, as a map of / to the human, must adapt in times of conflict for agency and survival. Alexander Galloway & Eugene Thacker have stated that while political conflicts of the past were face-offs between friend and foe, current restructurations of conflict and warfare have de-faced enmity. That is, technological advancements coupled with military strategies and tactics no longer require face-to-face combat. Enmity becomes an interface under constant mutation that one must tactically engage with to vie for political power and life-in-general.

Galloway & Thacker have urged their readers that tactics of nonexistence are the necessary ways in which we must now attempt to allude sovereign dominance: not nonexistence as absence but rather nonexistence as that which is nonrepresentable within sovereign rule. Importantly, Galloway & Thacker note that these acts of nonexistence are not nihilistic but the purest form of love. As our data proliferates throughout networks and our faces are always exposed, how do our faces become nonexistent in times of conflict? How is it possible to reconstitute the surfaces of faces to regenerate depth—a depth of nonexistence that is therefore a depth of love? What are the inherent assumptions and requirements that necessitate an ability as well as desire to be nonexistent in this sense? How do / can those who are fighting for their very existence practice a tactics of nonexistence?

This paper will read through three representations of faces in political conflict: 1) the human faces of female terrorists in the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, 2) the face of information in the obfuscated code presented in Ben Rubin’s 2005 artwork Dark Source (not sure about this choice; would prefer something that is NOT an art piece), and 3) the faceless faces of torture victims at Guantanamo Bay we encounter through photographs. For each, I will question the efficacy of nonexistence in relation to existence as well as surface and depth. I will argue that while faces attempt to not exist, they always only half succeed, and this attempt is already predicated upon privilege that many faces will never have. How do we reconcile efforts to not exist when so many struggle for the visibility of existence? To exist or not exist, are we not at all times still encrypted within a face of struggle and conflict?

Bibliography

Arquilla, John and David Ronfeldt. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001).

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (Palo Alto: Standford University Press, 1998).

Baudrillard, Jean. “Requiem for the Media.” The New Media Reader. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Balázs, Béla. “The Close-Up.” Film 200 History of Film Theory Reader. (UC Berkeley, Fall 2008).

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (New York: Verso, 2004).

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge” Grey Room 18 (Winter 2005).

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript On Control Societies.” Negotiations. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Galloway, Alexander R. and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Hasen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006).

Levinas. ???

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Parikka, Jussi. Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007).

love and methodologies

NOTE FROM CHRIS: respond to zach's post in the comments section.


to respond to the "fuck marriage" dicussion, i'll begin by posting casey's and xarene's comments, just so they're both here as reference points on the blog:

Casey:
So, I know I'm not using the blog, but I just wanted to pitch an initial idea for a CRUFT proposal. How about something called "fuck marriage" that is an attack on the sacred institution of marriage itself (especially if Prop 8 passes)? Rather than begging religious freaks or the State to "allow" others to be part of their stupid club that they don't even respect themselves, it would be way more interesting to just wage an all-out assault on the stupid retrograde institution of marriage. Abolish marriage for everyone. I actually think we'd find some interesting political affinities (libertarians, younger generations, etc.) I think there are all kinds of possibilities for driving a wedge between church and state and creating general uproar. Not that similar ideas haven't been in the mix since the 60s, but we could do it better and put a new perverse tech spin on it. Plus, fuckmarriage.org is available (as is fuckmarriage.com), and it's the best URL ever ...

Xarene:
grant and i were just discussing prop 8 over lunch. and i actually commented something like 'i am a staunch proponent to just say fuck marriage'!!; it's a fucking made-up business by the church, and the government's just got to meddle in anything that it can get it's hands on that a)make money, b)strip our rights. and i think i even suggested something like calling for no marriage for anyone, boy-girl, boy-boy whatever. none!

my friend, brian mcconnell, in san francisco actually got enough signatures to get on the ballot a change of name for the sewage facility for the sf bay area to be changed to george w. bush... his logic being we name buildings, institutions and facilities after presidents, so why not the sewage cleanup, since symbolically we'll be cleaning up the shit he's leaving behind for years to come.

so, we can get enough signatures to get 'abolishing marriage' on ballots for next november!!!

zach (cont):
i think the timeliness of a project on marriage could be incredibly striking and attract much attention. i am so sick of this struggle to belong--to gain something that, in the end, crushes you into conformity. i think we can do something amazing with this, but i would just like to point out that our "fuck" would have to be a compassionate one. it's important to remember that most people--gay or straight--want marriage, and we don't want to totally alienate those people...where would our audience be then? and i don't think we really only want to preach to the converted. how do we carry this out powerfully and remain inclusive? i think it's necessary to reflect upon people who are unable (or not critical enough) to separate affect and love from the institution of marriage in all its juridical, governmental entrapments. this leads me to something else i have been thinking about A LOT, which is a politics of love (something michael hardt is starting to work on). what is political love? how does it bind community, operate as a compassionate activism, and form subjectivity? perhaps this is an appropriate avenue to move a project on "fuck marriage" through?

in terms of the materialization of this, i would like to see a move away from traditional art objects. i'm hoping / assuming we all agree that we'd like to produce an art-like thing that would produce tangible political results. perhaps we could do something performative with the staging of a "wedding"? thinking about wedding cake makes me really excited.

i also wanted to talk about methodology. i think CRUFT already has a methodology to a certain degree, but i think now is the time to intricately flesh out what our methodology is. methodology drives practice, and it grounds our projects in a specific politics. for example, if you look at CAE and their methodology of electronic civil disobedience, this is the methology that has produced a multiplicity of their projects. CAE is able to address numerous, disparate projects, but they all have a similar conceptual grounding. i'd be curious to hear all your thoughts on methodology and how we can deeply tackle this issue. i also noticed that alex galloway recently gave a talk called "on methodology: the alternative algorithm." maybe we should try to see/hear this talk... and i hope this doesn't sound too monolithic--i think our methodology(ies) can be as flexible or rigid as we see fit.

think-tanks. we talked about this idea at ucla. i think it's worth returning to. there's SO much to work with here: what is the visuality of a think-tank? the relationship between the two words? we could do something here in relation to the production of discourse and how that gets targeted, perhaps? it appears to be a nice abstract machine to work various projects within and around.

in closing, i wanted to share this article on art and politics by guy debord: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/newforms.html

Manifesto v2.0

CRUFT

We are CRUFT, and we are an art movement.

CRUFT is the useless, abject detritus of technoculture. CRUFT is bloatware, redundancy, bitrot, memory leaks, abandoned vehicles on the information superhighway. CRUFT is computational crud, the sticky SCUM in the gears of Bill Gates' vision of "friction-free capitalism." Capitalism creates CRUFT, and CRUFT creates friction. Friction is our art. Friction is productive. It feeds on irrational exhuberence. Friction is the rubbing together of difference. Friction stains intercourse with pleasure. Friction cripples communication with poetry. CRUFT is the corrosive grit in the otherwise all-too-efficient engines of fasciocapitalism. CRUFT puts difference back into difference engines.

Global monoculture is a single, automated cleanroom. It is obsessed with an absolute, sterile utopian fantasy of technology and its false promises of rationality, control, perfection, scalability, calculability, fault-tolerance, and high-throughout efficiency. Cleanrooms are, by definition, containers for keeping out CRUFT. But this is a futile endeavor. CRUFT has always existed wherever there is technology and technology is everywhere, especially in cleanrooms. Our current technological condition arose from CRUFT, moved away from home, changed its name to "high technology," and tried to come clean. But CRUFT has come to take it back. 

CRUFT celebrates perverse technology. Technologies have always been perverse, but their perversity has been cruelly restricted to only one monolithic manifestation, that of white, Western, capitalist, heterosexual men. This unhealthfully limited perversity has only continued to hold power through its desperate, all-consuming drive to suppress any and all competing CRUFT. This is because CRUFT represents the diversity of perversity. But you can only sweep so much CRUFT under the bed before it seeps into the seams, finds its way between your sheets, becomes your bed itself. CRUFT is the stuff that dreams are made of. 

CRUFT champions the creation of artworks that don't work. Unlike all the productive individuals throughout the world who live only to work or are consumed by fears that less deserving people might steal their god-given rights to work, CRUFT doesn't want to work. That much should be obvious. That is why we are artists. Since CRUFT so strongly dislikes work, CRUFT finds it exceedingly hypocritical to expect our works to work. CRUFT loves them too much to inflict such senseless tedium upon them. 

CRUFT is not a demonstration of technology or the "application" of technology to art. Such statements are meaningless to CRUFT. Anyone can make technologies do what they were designed to do. Only CRUFT can make them art. Art is—and has always been—a process of outing perverse technologies, and this is the mission of CRUFT. CRUFT spreads like a virus, hijacking new points of technological friction and perverting them until they rupture into difference engines for generating more CRUFT. This is how CRUFT will transform the world.

Now is the time for CRUFT to reclaim what it rightfully owns. The entire planet has become an open playground for CRUFT. The generous paranoia of global capitalism and the governments it sponsors have transformed our physical landscape into a dense mesh of surveillance sensors, data networks, and high-speed processors. Thanks to the exaltation of cheapness and speed of production rather than concerns for security or design, every space in the world is being optimized for CRUFT. And CRUFT fully intends to use it. It is such an embarrassment of riches that CRUFT almost doesn't know where to begin. But CRUFT has begun, and CRUFT will be the most powerful art movement history has ever witnessed because the world obviously wants us to be. 

CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a corporation. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating science. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a media organization. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a religion. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating Woodstock. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a design firm. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a political body. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating an academic institution. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating the military. 

CRUFT is something so long-forgotten that it has all but passed from the cultural imagination, something much more precious, powerful, and infinitely more dangerous. 

CRUFT is an art movement. 

And CRUFT is moving...

Blogging is for sissies.

CRUFT Manifesto

CRUFT

We are CRUFT, and we are an art movement.

CRUFT is the useless, abject detritus of technoculture. CRUFT is bloatware, redundancy, bitrot, memory leaks, abandoned vehicles on the information superhighway. CRUFT is computational crud, the sticky SCUM in the gears of Bill Gates' vision of "friction-free capitalism." Capitalism creates CRUFT, and CRUFT creates friction. Friction is our art. Friction is positive. Friction is the rubbing together of difference. Friction stains intercourse with pleasure. Friction cripples communication with poetry. CRUFT is the corrosive grit in the otherwise all-too-efficient engines of fascism. CRUFT puts difference back into difference engines.

Global monoculture is a single, automated cleanroom. It is obsessed with an absolute, sterile utopian fantasy of technology and its false promises of rationality, control, perfection, scalability, calculability, fault tolerance, simplicity, modularization, high-throughout efficiency. Cleanrooms are, by definition, containers for keeping out CRUFT. But this is a futile endeavor. CRUFT has always existed wherever there is technology and technology is everywhere, especially in cleanrooms. Our current technological condition arose from CRUFT, moved away from home, changed its name to "high technology," and tried to come clean. But CRUFT has come to take it back.

CRUFT celebrates perverse technology. Technologies have always been perverse, but their perversity has been cruelly limited to only one monolithic manifestation: the pubescent masturboria of white, Western, capitalist, heterosexual men. This unhealthfully restricted perversity has only continued to hold power through its desperate, all-consuming drive to suppress any and all competing CRUFT. This is because CRUFT represents the diversity of perversity. But you can only sweep so much CRUFT under the bed before it seeps into the seams, finds its way between your sheets, becomes your bed itself. CRUFT is the stuff that dreams are made of.

CRUFT champions the creation of art works that don't work. Unlike all the productive individuals throughout the world who live only to work or are consumed by fears that less deserving people might steal their god-given rights to work, CRUFT doesn't want to work. That much should be obvious. That is why we are artists. Since CRUFT so strongly dislikes work, CRUFT finds it exceedingly hypocritical to expect our works to work. CRUFT loves them too much to inflict such senseless tedium upon them.

CRUFT is not a demonstration of technology or the "application" of technology to art. Such statements are meaningless to CRUFT. Anyone can make technologies do what they were designed to do. Only CRUFT can make them art. Art is—and has always been—a process of outing perverse technologies, and this is the mission of CRUFT. CRUFT locates points of technological friction and pushes them to such extremes that they become difference engines for generating more CRUFT. This is how CRUFT will transform the world.

Now is the time for CRUFT to reclaim what it rightfully owns. The entire planet has become an open playground for CRUFT. The generous paranoia of global capitalism and the governments it sponsors have transformed our physical landscape into a dense mesh of surveillance sensors, data networks, and high-speed processors. Thanks to the exaltation of cheapness and speed of production rather concerns for security or design, every space in the world is being optimized for CRUFT. And CRUFT fully intends to use it. It is such an embarrassment of riches that CRUFT almost doesn't know where to begin. But CRUFT has begun, and CRUFT will be the most powerful art movement history has ever witnessed because the world obviously wants us to be.

CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a corporation. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating science. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a media organization. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a religion. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a design firm. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a political body. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating an academic institution. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating a trust fund. CRUFT is not an art movement imitating the military.

CRUFT is something so long-forgotten that it has all but passed from the cultural imagination, something much more precious, powerful, and infinitely more dangerous.

CRUFT is an art movement.

And CRUFT is moving...