SF, Technoscience, Net.art: The Politics of Extrapolation
Art Journal, Fall 2000, v. 59, no. 3, pp. 64-73
SF is less of a genre and more of a "mode of awareness," a type of extrapolation. SF is embedded within the technologies it theorizes about and provides the biotech industry with a narrative of technological and scientific progress. The author proposes that new media and net.art can use SF as well as work on the level of bio and information technologies. Multiple_Dwelling is a collaborative project of real-time networked performances that actualize the relationship between virtual and real bodies in space. Mongrel probelmatizes socio-biology--or the application of scientific procedures on to society. They attempt to re-define the social as a field thickly demarcated by the political signifiers of race-class-ethnicity relations. Mongrel problematizes the liberal view that the internet is a medium for the people and shows how it, rather, channels people into a range of viable, culturally homogenous positions. For Mongrel, race and ethnicity are strategically encoded into online culture, reinforcing stereotyped racial categories. Mongrel asks how biosociality produces the social as essentially a biological problem. The importance of SF as artistic practice can be in part explained by Foucault's concepts of bio-power and biopolitics, which explain the strategies of management of the social body.
ITEM 2000.144 – available for viewing in the Research Centre
Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited
Multiple_Dwelling – Multiple_Dwelling
National Heritage – Mongrel
Critical Art Ensemble