Electronic Disturbance Theater, Floating Point Unit, Fakeshop

Abstract

This paper looks at several collectives of artists and hacktivists who, during the early 1990’s in New York City, used new media and web-based technologies to built strategies of critique and resistance to the digital divide, the network control society and the new eugenic consciousness powered by genetic engineering. The cyber activism and performances of Electronic Disturbance Theater, Floating Point Unit and Fakeshop helped to shape critical debates that addressed globalization, pan capitalism and body politics. The most well known among them, E.D.T., developed the concept of electronic civil disobedience and used a software application that allowed the group to conduct virtual sit-ins in support of the Zapatistas movement.

The publication in 1994 of The Electronic Disturbance by Critical Art Ensemble set the theoretical stage then to articulate the virtual as weapon and resistance against the dominant systems of cultural production and to argue in support of the virtual condition and recombinant culture conceived as relational tactics and models.

These New York based artist collectives blended radical politics with software and art, creating performances-based virtual events that established communication on a transnational level, enabling multiple participations in real time. These performances with their decentralized, multi-scalar networks powered forms of direct participatory democracy and created platforms and processes where diversified struggles could be networked together.

This paper discusses the diverse tactics used by these collectives and highlights their critical contributions to the history of contemporary media arts as well as their impact on digital activism in the age of neo liberal politics.