Brian Holmes

Bio

Brian Holmes is a cultural critic, living in Paris and Chicago, moving restlessly around the world. He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley,  was the English editor of publications for Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, was a member of the editorial collective of the French journal Multitudes from 2003 to 2008, and has recently published a collection of texts on art and social movements entitled Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering (New York: Autonomedia, 2007). His new book, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, is forthcoming from WHW/VanAbbemuseum and is available in full at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com. Holmes was awarded the Vilém Flusser Prize for Theory at Transmediale in Berlin in 2009.

Abstract

Predatory Networks
Self-Defense and Society

In the age of asymmetric information-gathering, computer networks can no longer be celebrated as potentially autonomous spaces of interaction. Instead they must primarily be seen as hunting grounds for the major economic and ideological predators. With the growth of computerized finance since the early 1970s, a large number of "digital laborers" have come to be employed in this psycho-social predation, of which they are simultaneously agents and objects. A public health crisis ensues, where self-defense against dominant ideas and behavioral routines becomes the necessary prelude to any recovery of collective decision-making capacities. Artist-activists have led the way in responding to these threatening conditions. Is it not time for the academy to drop the fictions of technological progress and commercial neutrality, and make critical network studies into the operational hub for a revolt of the prey?