Brian Holmes - Escape the Overcode

Occupy Overcode

Occupy

Overcode

-Surveillance (Panopticon & Foucault)

“The media, the big mass media controlled by the 1%".

-New form of control of the society (Holmes)

"As a result of this control data that the environment becomes overcoded with an optimizing algorithm, fed by data coming directly from you. Sort of second sphere which is the ultimate place for control, an invisible sphere of fibre optic cables and electromagnetic waves moving around us, tracking us, scanning our neural mesh and reacting to our actions".

- Occupy = “movement of awareness” “We don’t have any sustained institutional commitment, any governmental Golems who are willing to wake up from their waking dreams. And that makes it very difficult to bring together, over the middle and long term, the diverse range of people who are needed to help change the culture of the present.”

- Capitalism. “The development of capitalism is changing every thirty or forty years, by economic crisis that makes it to restructure the entire system in organizational, technological, financial and geopolitical terms."

- Argentinian crisis. "What happened in Argentina is the fact of a crash in the international financial system, engulfing enormous quantities of fictional capital, which reduces that money to nothing even while it swallows up the jobs and the savings of the working classes."

Escaping Piet

"skin color becomes visible as a basis for determining the order of identities and differences and subsequently penetrates the body to become the truth of the self. . . . Race is on the skin, but skin is the sign of something deeper, something hidden in the invisible interior of the organism" (p.11)

"the trademark image only succeeds in capturing the attention and loyalty of consumers when it allows them to fill its empty signifier with personal meanings." (p. 32)

Occupy

Amsterdam

Zwarte Piet

• "...even if I'm black as coal I mean well…"

• "Saint Nicolas, enter with your black servant"

Conclusions

What else can be done with the subversive potentials of art in the control society? Can we play a significant game with the cybernetic society that has created us?

Presentation outline

Main ideas

and terms

• Overcode

• Affective territory

“An affective territory disappears if it isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and conjunctions.” (p. 14)

• Emergent territory

“An emergent territory is only as good as the codes that sustain it. Every social movement, every shift in the geography of the heart and revolution in the balance of the senses needs its aesthetics, its grammar*, its science and legalisms.” (p. 14)

• About Brian Holmes
• Main Ideas & Terms
• Case Studies
• Occupy Amsterdam
• Zwarte Piet protest
• Conclusions
• Street Art

Street Art

Brian Holmes

• Teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fe, Switzerland.
• Published "Hieroglyphs of the Future"(2003), "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering"(2008) "Escape the Overcode: Activist art in Control Society"(2009).
• Member of editorial board of Multitudes (Paris) and of the art magazines Springerin (Vienna) and Brumaria (Barcelona)
• Runs a blog Continental Drift-> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/

Brian Holmes - Escape the Overcode

Activist Art in the Control Society