Bronia Iwanczak, Suzanne Treister: The ICOLS’ Strategy, Defense and Arms


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Title:


    The ICOLS’ Strategy, Defense and Arms

Artist(s) and People Involved:


Symposium:


Artist Statement:


    GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

    Each department of ICOLS will generate weapons, scenarios, position papers on the best way to wage war/gain objectives/maintain a defense. There is no unitary (imagined war) scenario, rather each contributor is free to pursue their own directions.

    Leonardo Da Vinci’s work a designer of weapons, tanks, flying machines, military complexes and bridges for the Duke of Milan and Cesare Borgia has become an exemplar of an ‘ideal’ relationship between artistic production and technology, which by the development of a technological culture is seen as somehow fatally disenfranchising arts practices. A desire to reinstate this relationship can be seen in the naming of the USA technology-based arts journal after the Italian artist.

    Technology-based art stilt sees itself as operating on various advanced, transformative edges, using the teleological imperatives as a master narrative to inflect the rhetoric of the practice with the urgency of an otherwise discredited modernism. This combines with concurrent ideas of social engagement, and the rhetoric of resistance – opposition, guerilla, hacker-culture, info-war and so forth. The default positioning of the techno-artist is modeled on that of the terrorist – a techno-Trotsky moving covertly against hegemonic oppressors: a Microsoft Mujuhadeen. But every Mujuhadeen needs a Kalashnikov.

    Artists are in a complex relationship with the military/industrial/technology and entertainment industries. The ‘COLS Arms Fairaims to make overt these narratives and histories. COLS aims to reveal hidden programs and arsenals for our defense, security, future and safety.

    ICOLS (International Corporation of Lost Structures) is a creative international space which utilises as a structural device the dominant contemporary model of the corporate structure. Within this structure the departmental titles create contexts for analyses of history, the present and projections for the future.

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