Artistic network practice

Is it possible for an artist to question the legal and security conditions of the public domain in networks, and is it possible to do this in the framework of Art institutions? - How far do exhibitions under the label of ‘hacking’, ‘piracy’ or ‘open source’ open up a framework for critical art work? - Is it possible to place tactical media, which are hybrid agencies per se, into the art field without reducing their transformative potential Knowbotic Research, in its recent projects, enters the unstable zone of legal and security conditions of networks and demands new tactics and agencies inside the domain of the public .

Such new ways of public acting cannot fall into the trap of the worn dichotomy of private and public but rather open new possibilities of public agency for domains of the commons and include tactics which were seen as inappropriate for the contextualization of the public domain in the modern sense. Instead of referring only to the concepts of transparency, visibility and manifestation, we suggest to upgrade the public agencies with non-representational activities like encrypting, rendering invisible, disinforming, hiding, fleeting, tunnelling, disturbing, spoofing, and other camouflage tactics.

What we are looking for is a potential for the production of a different type of network politics, where a fluid capacity to connect and disconnect through heterogeneous coded enactions is used productively as a kind of degree zero (where power comes from), which it is important to return and relate to. Such capacity in fact is in itself not so much neutral as not immediately given. Tactical and coded connectivity allows for difficult or easy communication, for long term commitments, encrypted and fleeting affairs, it is crossed by conflicts, gives no guarantees of success and possesses a weird kind of memory, collective, fleeting and yet durable. It demands a sustained effort to redefine, design, act out the domains of the commons.