Alexis Anais Avedisian

In practice you become coextensive with the data-constellation you project. Social scores of all different kinds—credit scores, academic scores, threat scores—as well as commercial and military pattern-of-life observations impact the real lives of real people, both reformatting and radicalizing social hierarchies by ranking, filtering, and classifying.

Bureaucracy is based on utopian thinking because it assumes people to be perfect from it’s own point of view.

Jacques Rancière tells a mythical story about how the separation of signal and noise might have been accomplished in Ancient Greece. Sounds produced by affluent male locals were defined as speech, whereas women, children, slaves, and foreigners were assumed to produce garbled noise.10 The distinction between speech and noise served as a kind of political spam filter. Those identified as speaking were labeled citizens and the rest as irrelevant, irrational, and potentially dangerous nuisances. Similarly, today, the question of separating signal and noise has a fundamental political dimension. Pattern recognition resonates with the wider question of political recognition. Who is recognized on a political level and as what? As a subject? A person? A legitimate category of the population? Or perhaps as 'dirty data'?

More than simply a protest demanding this or that finite reform, occupation from this angle involved the blockage of official flows and functions in order to reappropriate time, space, and resources for the reproduction of collective life against the relationships of the wage and private property. Thus, holding space per se is not an end in and of itself, but it provides a base of operations from which to expand and deepen the struggle beyond its immediate site.

In a kind of historical displacement, contemporary art was at that moment thrown into relief as a distant prefiguration or prophecy of what was now happening in real time, too close for the comfort of the exhibitions, conferences, and catalogues within which the radical aspirations of contemporary art had sought refuge. As an historiographical provocation, one that admittedly borders on the eschatological, it might be said that this moment of passage represents the end of socially engaged art.

Rather than a unique realm to be protected from either brute instrumentalization or compensatory gestures of participation, art was an essential part of the imaginary and practice of the movements as they engaged in life-and-death struggles involving both antagonistic protest and the affirmative cultivation of new forms of democratic.