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13/9/2012

The Articulation of Protest

Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA, Oslo

The Articulation of Protest:
A Programme on Some of the Logistics of Information
and Social Activism Today

Live audio streaming

In his essay ‘What Is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?’, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi uses this question to trace the development of autonomy from the historical movement of Autonomia, elaborating on a state of mind that must take root in any type of self-organisation of cognitive work. Cultural producers use autonomy today to make a claim for deregulation and secure a living in multiple ways, but these strategies often dispute legal procedures. This is specially the case with copyright law, which, according to experts and activists in the field, has become obsolete in relation to contemporary communication platforms.

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway presents ‘The Articulation of Protest’, a programme of two lectures that intends to address this conjuncture. The first lecture, on 14 September, will be presented by the Swedish historian Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) and the second on 21 September by social theorist Alberto Toscano, author of Fanaticism: On the Use of an Idea. The lectures will look into strategies that have emerged in recent times through actions and communication, and in dialogue or confrontation with existing legislation, with the aim to secure free circulation of information and knowledge in the face of the state's or capital's attempts to control and to commodify them. In doing so, they will explore individual and collective initiatives and other strategic choices, and discuss them in relation to a history of critical organisation, of free speech and activism.

The lectures will also be made available through radio streaming on OCA's website.

ABOUT THE PROGRAMME
Rasmus Fleischer lecture
Friday, 14 September 2012 / 19:00
In 2009, after months of legal disputes, authorities in Sweden won an injunction against Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent file-sharing site, to block users’ access. In response, Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire website, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers, making it possible for hundreds of new versions of the site to be set up.

Rasmus Fleischer, one of the founders of Piratbyrån, closely aligned with the Pirate Bay, will speak about political engagement and discuss to what extent speed or, on the contrary, delay might become a resource for a deepened critique of contemporary politics. Fleischer will do so from the perspective of current developments and polemics within ‘social media’, to look at how both enthusiasm and skepticism toward the internet may, in some cases, be part of the same counter-revolutionary coin.

Alberto Toscano lecture
Friday, 21 September 2012 / 19:00
Logistics has been the focus of much recent artistic work that seeks to unsettle consensual perceptions of our world. But, because of logistics’ privileging of invisible circulation over the symbols of power and resistance, an art concerned with it necessarily works against conventional notions of art as protest, dissent or intervention. In his talk, Alberto Toscano will explore this rift between protest and logistics in two ways: the first concerns the aesthetics of information used in the representation of dissent and the mapping of logistics, and the second involves analysing the shift of dissent from a remonstration against authority to a consideration of the way in which logistics tends to sideline the art of protest.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Rasmus Fleischer
Rasmus Fleischer is a Swedish historian, writer and occasional musician. For nearly a decade, he has been lecturing about the crisis of copyright. He was one of the persons behind Piratbyrån (or The Bureau for Piracy), a group which during its existence (2003–09) tried to actively question the basics of ‘intellectual property’ in the intersections of technology, art and politics. He is the author of the books Musikens politiska ekonomi (The Political Economy of Music, 2012), Boken & Biblioteket (The Book and the Library, 2011) and Postdigitala manifestet (The Postdigital Manifesto, 2009), which is also his PhD thesis at the Institute of Contemporary History at Södertörn University, concerning the motivations behind regulation of sound media during the 20th century. As a historian, Rasmus Fleischer is also investigating the transformations of contemporary fascism.

Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano is a social theorist, philosopher and a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Toscano is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010) and The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (2006). He has translated into English several works by Alain Badiou, such as Logics of Worlds (2009), The Century (2007) and Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005), and is co-editor of Alain Badiou’s Theoretical Writings (2004) and On Beckett (2003). He has co-translated and prefaced Éric Alliez’s The Signature of the World (2004) and Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes (2007). He has published several articles on contemporary philosophy, ontology and social theory. He sits on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism, and edits the Italian List for Seagull Books. He is currently completing a book on representations of contemporary capital, titled Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle).

Image: From William Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971)

For more information on the programme, please contact OCA’s press officer Maria Moseng at maria.moseng@oca.no.

Rasmus Fleischer lecture: Friday, 14 September 2012 / 19:00

Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Nedre Gate 7 - 0551 Oslo, Norway

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