writing

Tactical Media

Electronic Mediations Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors

28 Tactical Media Rita Raley

27 Reticulations: Jean- Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political Philip Armstrong

26 Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds Timothy Murray

25 Ex- foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path Terry Harpold

24 Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now Gary Hall

23 Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Lisa Nakamura

22 Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors

21 The Exploit: A Theory of Networks Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

20 Database Aesthetics Victoria Vesna, Editor

19 Cyberspaces of Everyday Life Mark Nunes

18 Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture Alexander R. Galloway

17 Avatars of Story Marie- Laure Ryan

16 Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi Timothy C. Campbell

15 Electronic Monuments Gregory L. Ulmer

14 Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine Astrid Deuber- Mankowsky

13 The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory Thomas Foster

12 Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory Peter Krapp

11 Biomedia Eugene Thacker

10 Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism Ann Weinstone

9 Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society Steven Shaviro

8 Cognitive Fictions Joseph Tabbi

7 Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet Diana Saco

6 Writings Vilém Flusser

5 Bodies in Technology Don Ihde

4 Cyberculture Pierre Lévy

3 What’s the Matter with the Internet? Mark Poster

2 High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman R. L. Rutsky

1 Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality Ken Hillis

Tactical Media

RiTa Raley

electronic Mediations 28

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis

London

The Introduction and chapters 2 and 3 include material previously published in

“Statistical Material: Globalization and the Digital Art of John Klima,” CR: The New

Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 67–89. A shorter version of chapter 1 was

published as “Border Hacks: The Risks of Tactical Media,” in Risk and the War on

Terror, ed. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Copyright 2009 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the

publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520

http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raley, Rita.

Tactical media / Rita Raley.

p. cm. — (Electronic mediations ; 28)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8166-5150-4 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-5151-1 (pb : alk.

paper)

1. Mass media—Simulation methods. 2. Digital media. 3. Computer simulation.

I. Title.

P93.6.R35 2009

302.23'1—dc22

2008046554

Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Russell, who is very generous,

and Alan, who is very patient

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Culture and art have become productive resources. But, exactly like

the “general intellect,” they can transform themselves into political

resources for the multitude.

— Paolo ViRno

I don’t believe in revolution, but I do believe in revolutionary resistance.

— Paul ViRilio

May I tell a story? I have no idea whether it is true. It is the third

day of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Lenin is sitting somewhere in

Saint Petersburg. Trotsky comes running in and says, “Kronstadt has

been taken! We are lost!” Or whatever he said. And Lenin answers,

“It doesn’t matter! We existed for three days!” That’s what I mean.

It won’t be carried to completion, but we are a generation that sees

a vision of a utopia.

— ViléM FlusseR, The Freedom of the Migrant

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi

introduction Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance 1

1. Border Hacks Electronic Civil Disobedience

and the Politics of Immigration 31

2. Virtual War Information Visualization

and Persuasive Gaming 65

3. speculative Capital Black Shoals

and the Visualizing of Finance 109

Notes 153

Index 187

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xi

Commentary on the impact of September 11 on academic criticism

has become something of a cliché. Nevertheless, I cannot but note that

events in this decade led me to shift my research focus from the mod-

ern colonial archives to the political, economic, and media systems of

the contemporary moment. For a time, I thought this book was a con-

sequence of my having moved to Southern California in the summer of

2001, but I have come to understand that it is the result not only of my

immersion in the IT- rich environment of California but also of my years

at the University of Minnesota, where the faculty and students work-

ing in the area of contemporary cultural studies and theory are without

equal.

Katherine Hayles has been a great supporter of my work, and I can

only gesture toward a complete acknowledgment of all that is owed her.

I am also hugely indebted to Mark Poster and Doug Armato both for

championing this book for the series and keeping an eye on its prog-

ress. For more than a decade, I have worked under the conscious and un-

conscious influence of Alan Liu as he was writing his magisterial study

of knowledge work, The Laws of Cool. It goes without saying that Alan

continues to give voice to many of my ideas and helps me bring them

into being. So, too, Russell Samolsky has been collaborator and combat-

ant; without his input this book would have taken a very different form

indeed.

Thanks to the following for contributions that range from careful

reading to general advice and reading suggestions: Carl Gutiérrez- Jones,

Philip Armstrong, Julian Stallabrass, Karen Steigman, Jennifer Jones,

Acknowledgments

xii aCknoWledgMenTs

Jani Scandura, Maria Damon, Paula Rabinowitz, William Paulson, Mary

Poovey, Brenda Silver, Aden Evens, Geert Lovink, Lisa Parks, Robert

Nideffer, Noah Wardrip- Fruin, and John Klima. Friends and colleagues

at Rice University, in particular Betty Joseph, Susan Lurie, Krista Comer,

and Thomas Chivens, made invaluable contributions to the project dur-

ing my time in residence there.

A version of chapter 1 was presented to the ISA- sponsored workshop

“Governing by Risk in the War on Terror” (March 2006). I am grateful

to Marieke de Goede, Louise Amoore, and other workshop participants

for their valuable comments and suggestions. Another version of this

chapter was presented as part of the symposium “Alternative Networks,”

sponsored by the Global Cultures in Transition research initiative at the

University of California, Santa Barbara (May 2006). I am also grateful

to audiences at the University of California, Irvine; Dartmouth College;

University College, Cork; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Blekinge

Institute of Technology; and Uppsala University.

Finally, particular gratitude must be extended to all the artists and

tactical media practitioners who inform this book. It is my fervent wish

that this book will become obsolete because the world will have changed

so dramatically that this study of art- activism could only appear as a

quaint historical artifact, its latent pessimism misguided, its failure to

imagine otherwise indicative of the author’s poverty of imagination.

Until such a point, I will continue to look to tactical media artists for

inspiration and guidance.

1

Why save the world when we can design it?

—­Serpica­Naro

There is much in the world to protest. The pressing question, particu-

larly for a generation schooled in intellectual history by those who be-

lieved in revolution and had in fact stormed the barricades, is this: how

does one express dissent and conceive of revolutionary transformation

while distancing oneself from one’s forebears, whose lingering nostalgia

for their own storming of the barricades, not to mention their idealistic

belief in the possibility of visible and permanent social change, seems

quaint, if even a trifle embarrassing? Of course, the Battle of Seattle

caught the world by surprise. Antiglobalization, WTO, and G8 protests

have been nothing if not spectacular, starkly defined spatial and tem-

poral events. So, too, were the street demonstrations in support of U.S.

immigrant rights in the spring of 2006. But the fact remains that the

doxa about the value, cultural significance, and efficacy of the streets

has changed. This is less an objective than a subjective truth, a truth of

perception, a general impression of a shared sensibility. It is precisely

this change in sensibility that politically engaged new media art projects

negotiate. As we will see in the pages that follow, Critical Art Ensemble’s

suggestion that “the streets are dead capital” informs their theses about

the work, and the targets, of tactical media. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE)

argues that the shift in revolutionary investments corresponds with a

shift in the nature of power, which has removed itself from the streets

and become nomadic. Activism and dissent, in turn, must, and do, enter

the network, as we will see from the new media art projects I address in

this book. These projects are not oriented toward the grand, sweeping

revolutionary event; rather, they engage in a micropolitics of disruption,

intervention, and education.

Introduction Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance

iNtroductioN2

Josh On and Futurefarmers’ They Rule (2001/2004) affords us an ex-

ample of a new media work that is at once aesthetic design, intellectual

investigation, and political activism.1 A work of tactical cartography,

They Rule affords users the ability to visualize the myriad and intricate

connections among Fortune 100 corporations and directors. Users can

choose from a list of institutions, people, and companies and build their

own maps from the data the artists have compiled from SEC filings and

public Web sites. Or they can view the archived maps that powerfully

document the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of “the ten

richest people” and “the magnificent seven.”

By rendering economic and political complexity in the form of a basic

cartography, They Rule strives to make legible the kind of behind- the-

scenes loyalties and corporate collusions that drive public policy. Fur-

ther, its use of simple, monochromatic icons and geometric lines sug-

gests that “design” as such is constituted by the architecture of corporate

power. With Mark Lombardi’s graphite- on- paper drawings, Michael

Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud

as precedents, the maps voted most popular tend to be those that trace

the degrees of separation from, variously, the Bush family, Dick Cheney,

Harken Energy, and Halliburton.2 Tactical maps such as these do not

offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian carto-

graphic practice; in that they are individually tailored and produced,

they are fundamentally subjective. They Rule in particular embodies a

sense of bottom- up resistance: it may map the top- down power relations,

but it does so in a manner and style we have come to associate with cul-

tural dissent and oppositionality. See what I have made, the tactical user

says. See how I try to manage the ties that bind and produce me. It may

be a hollow laugh at power, but it is still a laugh, the enjoyment at once

solitary and shared, for, as the list of “hot” or favored maps on the site

indicates, They Rule forges a social bond and a political consciousness

held in common.3

Oil politics are even more directly at the fore in Michael Mandiberg’s

Oil Standard, a Firefox plug- in that uses real- time pricing informa-

tion in the dynamic conversion of U.S. dollars into barrels of crude oil.4

The most recent book on media activism? One half barrel. Last month’s

water bill? A full barrel. So are we instructed in the new monetary stan-

iNtroductioN 3

dard, the fluctuating unit of account to which the dollar is pegged, a unit

that in turn fixes the value of the dollar. There are practical differences

between these two projects— one is a visualization tool, and the other is

a browser plug- in— but they share certain pedagogical and ideological

investments. How we might account for the work they do, and how we

might account for the political interventions of other new media artist-

activists, is the subject of this book.

Tactical Media contributes to the discourse on the digital humani-

ties by examining the aesthetic and critical practices that have specifi-

cally emerged out of, and in direct response to, both the postindustrial

society and neoliberal globalization. The hallmark of the postindustrial

society is the information economy and the emergence of a correspond-

ing technical intelligentsia. It is theorized in these terms by Daniel Bell

and in terms of informational capitalism by Manuel Castells, who uses

the phrase to describe the new “techno- economic system,” the structure

of which was ultimately determined by the neoliberalism of the 1980s.5

Regardless of the terminology employed, it is “information” and the col-

lapse of the Bretton Woods system regulating the monetary economy that

make possible neoliberal globalization, the name given to the philosophy

governing our current global markets. In sum, the ideology of neoliberal

Josh On/Futurefarmers, They Rule, “Why Harvard Doesn’t Fund

Alternative Health Care Research” (created by user Shojo).

iNtroductioN4

globalization holds that financial markets should operate unfettered and

that state intervention or regulation of any kind is anathema. What new

digital art practices have emerged out of a context in which efficiency,

operationalism, and instrumental rationality are core values and market

transactions the predominant social good?

One such art practice is the persuasive game, the mechanics of which

are particularly well suited to political themes such as labor, migrancy,

and war. As Ian Bogost and others have noted, persuasive games take

care to model causality and consequences; within them, critical argu-

ments are made via the emphasis on the effects of gameplay actions. For

example, the dystopian TuboFlex, by Molleindustria, takes precarious

labor as its central theme.6

Set in 2010, the game literalizes the ideology of a flexible, modular,

and mobile workforce with Tuboflex Inc., a postindustrial workplace in

which the player/worker is propelled on demand from task to task via

something like a pneumatic tube. Somewhat in the mode of Chaplin’s

Modern Times, the repetitive and often mechanized work speeds up as

the player progresses through the different workplace settings, which

include a McDonald’s drive- through window, Santa Claus putting smiles

on the faces of children (an instance of affective labor), assembly line

drilling, an office worker with a computer, and a box handler at a ship-

ping warehouse. All the scenarios feature temporary work, replaceable

and finite (as with the seasonal labor during Christmas). The quickest of

players can manage to stave off the ending of the game for a time, but all

attempts to play end with the central character begging on the street. The

game rhetoric is clearly pedagogical and persuasive, as with all political

or activist games. The lesson of this game in particular is that “life” has

been mobilized for work, that the techniques for biopolitical manage-

ment of the body include the tools of the postindustrial workplace, and

that postindustrial labor is not in fact radically heterogeneous.

Many of the formal features and thematic concerns of the field of new

media art, information art, or digital art have been articulated in works

authored or edited by Michael Rush, Lev Manovich, Stephen Wilson,

Christiane Paul, Julian Stallabrass, Rachel Greene, Lucy Kimbell, Bruce

Wands, Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, and Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito.7

On the whole, these surveys address the genealogies of new media art,

iNtroductioN 5

the specificity of medium and mechanism, new modes of reader- user en-

gagement, the distinctive language of computational media, the particu-

larities of composition and delivery (programming languages, software

applications, the cultural and technical aspects of networks). Combining

an analysis of social contexts and media texts, my book will address the

varying responses of new media artists to the neoliberal condition in all

its aspects— political, economic, cultural. In that it foregrounds techno-

logical expertise, it is less a study of new media art in terms of consump-

tion and modes of embodied interactivity than a study of production

and technique. There have been numerous studies of “wired” political

engagement in all its diverse forms, network- based activism and politi-

cal organization (e.g., clicktivism, smart mobs) and hacktivism chief

among them.8 While I do cross paths with some of these studies in my

treatment of electronic civil disobedience and other hacktivist tactics,

my interests lie in articulating the aesthetic strategies of artist- activists

producing persuasive games, information visualizations, and hybrid (we

might even say “new”) forms of academic criticism. I will note, too, that

I do not propose a full catalog of works that would be situated under

the label “activism, hacktivism, artivism.” Such archiving efforts already

exist, and to pursue that course would be to move into the mode of the

Molleindustria, TuboFlex.

iNtroductioN6

encyclopedia, somewhat like Stephen Wilson’s crucial guide Informa­

tion Arts. Instead, I sample works and art practices that are paradig-

matic. My study will not collapse the material distinctions among these

different media projects, but it will articulate them all as instances of

tactical media. This is to say that they are all forms of critical interven-

tion, dissent, and resistance. I will go further to find strong and sugges-

tive correlations between tactical media— as I understand it, but also as

it has been theorized by Critical Art Ensemble, Carbon Defense League,

and the digerati— and virtuosity, intellectual labor that manifests in vir-

tuoso performance rather than extrinsic product.

The Next Five Minutes

Generally taken to refer to practices such as reverse engineering, hack-

tivism, denial- of- service attacks, the digital hijack, contestational ro-

botics, collaborative software, and open- access technology labs, “tactical

media” is a mutable category that is not meant to be either fixed or exclu-

sive. If there were one function or critical rationale that would produce a

sense of categorical unity, it would be disturbance. In its most expansive

articulation, tactical media signifies the intervention and disruption of a

dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which

signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking

becomes possible. Tactical media operates in the field of the symbolic,

the site of power in the postindustrial society. Critical Art Ensemble has

insisted that tactical media are pliable and that pliability allows for on-

the- fly critical intervention: statements, performances, and actions that

must continually be altered in response to their object, “constantly re-

configured to meet social demands.”9 Geert Lovink has also emphasized

the inclusiveness and flexibility of tactical media, which he identifies as

a “deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating ‘temporary consensus

zones’ based on unexpected alliances.”10 In use since the first Next Five

Minutes conference (N5M) in Amsterdam in 1993, the term “tactical”

itself was, as Lovink explains, “introduced to disrupt and go beyond the

rigid dichotomies that have restricted thinking in this area for so long.”11

As the organizers of N5M indicate, the dichotomies under pressure in-

clude amateur and professional, “all forms of old and new, both lucid

iNtroductioN 7

and sophisticated media.”12 Since the category of tactical media has been

fluid since its inception and since the assemblage of practices it would

seek to describe has not yet been fully articulated, I will assume a criti-

cal license to work within its perimeters, highlighting certain discur-

sive features and introducing others. The distinct temporality of tactical

media, their ephemerality, along with their opening to the unexpected,

will be one of the key components of my analysis.

That tactical media present a challenge to “the existing semiotic re-

gime by replicating and redeploying it,” as Critical Art Ensemble ex-

plains, might seem to indicate that the critical object is the substitution

of one message for another, the imposition of an alternative set of signs in

the place of the dominant. But when the Yes Men launched gwbush.com

and announced the “Amnesty 2000” campaign, effectively hijacking the

president’s official Web site, their purpose was not to impose a defini-

tive countermessage but to provoke and to reveal, to defamiliarize and

to critique. Lovink notes that tactical networks do not “aim to become

an alternative CNN, a Yahoo! for the protest generation.”13 Rather, the

activity of disturbance and provocation “offers participants in the proj-

ects a new way of seeing, understanding, and (in the best- case scenario)

interacting with a given system.”14 A charming but dated and even fu-

tile endeavor, perhaps, hopelessly removed from the real politics and ac-

tivities of social transformation? Irredeemably caught up in the kind of

irony that disguises a co- optation by the very system with which one

putatively interacts anew? In what terms can we speak of the efficacy of

cybersquatting? Critical Art Ensemble addresses the question by casting

its lot with speculation, uncertainty, and the aleatory:

Treading water in the pool of liquid power need not be an image of acquies-

cence and complicity. In spite of their awkward situation, the political activist

and the cultural activist (anachronistically known as the artist) can still pro-

duce disturbances. Although such action may more closely resemble the ges-

tures of a drowning person, and it is uncertain just what is being disturbed, in

this situation the postmodern roll of the dice favors the act of disturbance.15

It is not simply that interventions by tactical media may disturb but that

the outcomes of those disturbances remain uncertain and unpredictable.

Moreover, we can see in CAE’s figure of the drowning person an em-

phasis on the perception of the audience: we can read the interventions

iNtroductioN8

either as hopeless desperation or, to extend the metaphor, as a strong

battle against the currents. For historical perspective we might juxta-

pose CAE’s hope of “offering participants a new way of seeing, under-

standing, and interacting” with Félix Guattari’s 1992 call to “invent new

spheres of reference so as to open the way to a reappropriation and a

resymbolization of the use of communication and information tools

outside of the hackneyed formulae of marketing.”16 The actual devel-

opments we have seen in the intervening years— peer- to- peer comput-

ing, as just one example— retroactively respond to this call for symbolic

awareness and individual technological mastery. What I wish to empha-

size in CAE’s vision and Guattari’s appeal is the necessary abstraction,

the unspecified qualities, of the way, the “new way,” forward. As will be-

come clear throughout the course of this book, tactical media requires

a certain openness, a surrendering to chance or the “postmodern roll of

the dice”; even more, it requires that its practitioners cede control over

its outcomes.

It is in these terms that we can understand the tendency of Critical

Art Ensemble and collectives such as the Bureau of Inverse Technology

to provide assembly instructions for their products and projects, not all

of which are designed to be fully realized. The Bureau of Inverse Tech-

nology’s “BIT Cab” project plans to co- opt the wireless GPS infrastruc-

ture currently in use for advertisements on taxi roofs to provide site-

specific information about toxic pollution instead.17 For this and their

other projects, the critical emphasis falls not only on the moment of exe-

cution, the actual performance, but also on the engineer’s reports and kit

instructions, information that would allow viewers themselves to master

the mechanism. To do so would be to reappropriate the technological

platform, to deploy it for “inverse” purposes. Exercises in “tactical giz-

mology” are fundamentally educative: witness an illustrative Eyebeam

workshop (August 2002), the objective of which was to give participants

hands- on experience with hardware and to teach them to build digital

tags for “friendly” interventions in spaces where we have come to expect

screens, such as movie kiosks.18 The broader ideological and pedagogical

imperative, the balancing of symbolic and network awareness, similarly

lies behind Konrad Becker and Francisco de Sousa Webber’s Netbase/t0,

a nonprofit Internet provider that also supports workshops, lectures,

iNtroductioN 9

and instructional courses in the interest of developing a “heightened

consciousness for the implications of the new communication and in-

formation technologies.”19 What interests me in particular is the double

lesson, both the kit information for “BIT Cab” and the environmental

messages transmitted through the taxi displays. The Bureau of Inverse

Technology’s FAQ unusually comprises authoritative questions without

answers, ranging from “How do you negotiate the difference between

Art and Engineering?” to “Why?” It is almost necessary that these inqui-

ries be left unanswered, I will speculate, because tactical media focuses

on open- ended questions rather than prepackaged lessons, instructions

rather than products.20 Carbon Defense League— whose many projects

include Re- code.com, FtheVote.com, and the collaborative reverse engi-

neering of a Nintendo Game Boy— proposes that tactical media aims to

create situations “where criticality can occur.”21 More important, “tacti-

cal media practitioners should not suggest where the use of these quali-

ties [criticality] should lead once unrestrained.”22 Their operative field,

rather, is that of the next five minutes.

Choosing tactics over strategy might seem to suggest a certain tempo-

ral structure: the temporary rather than the protracted, the unguarded

and unexpected moment rather than the long- range plan. But, as Car-

bon Defense League explains, both temporalities are at work in tactical

media:

Incident- based parasitic media response takes place in a very specif ic time

and space. There is no need for the parasite to live longer than a few days or

even a few seconds. The more complex system is generative parasitic media

response. Generative parasites must adapt and grow with their host system.

This growth creates an allowance for greater sustainability of backdoors or

hijacks. A parasite need not take advantage of its host’s vulnerability to hijack.

It is in the best interest of the parasite to live and feed alongside its host.23

The incident- based parasite exists in the here and now. It uses itself up

in its operation. The generative parasite, on the other hand, has to study

and understand its host; it must adapt in order to thrive. So, too, does

the host adapt to its parasite. While parasitic media responses may have

a cumulative effect, any systemic change they bring about may be both

imperceptible and undesirable.

This is avant- garde artistic experimentation that shuns the manifesto

iNtroductioN10

(“the style of the disempowered”), lacks a big picture, and refuses strat-

egy: the doing, the performance, is all.24 As Critical Art Ensemble ob-

serves, “After two centuries of revolution and near- revolution, one his-

torical lesson continually appears— authoritarian structure cannot be

smashed; it can only be resisted.”25 There are, then, as Lovink notes,

“no apocalyptic or revolutionary expectations here.”26 Absolute victory is

neither a desirable nor a truly attainable object for tactical media, which

is why it will be possible for me to trace parallels between guerrilla war-

fare and systems disruption. The political imaginary for our moment

is thus not Sergei Eisenstein’s October but the muddled film adaptation

of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. Its fantasy— the destruction of the Old

Bailey and Parliament without loss of life— and the abstractions of V’s

idea tell us a great deal about the symbolic value and currency of this

revolutionary mythology at the present.27 Indeed, is this not the fantasy

of revolution without revolution, as Slavoj Žižek would say?28 Josh On,

whose Antiwargame I will address in a later chapter, maintains that “it is

possible to have a revolution” in the game simulation that he has collab-

oratively designed. In its theoretical outcome, “everyone jumps up and

down and is happy. I think you need a ton of protesters.”29 Situating even

the simulation of revolution within the realm of possibility, and fram-

ing it as revolutionary happiness rather than revolutionary violence, On’s

comment has much to tell us about the orientation of tactical media.

There are no proffered fantasies of radical systemic change: it exists as a

possibility within the realm of the imagination— another technology of

simulation— but it requires collective action, a “ton of protesters.” This

is not the mystification of the California Ideology 2.0, whereby digital

artisans articulate a vision of individual freedom realizable from within

the structures of the network society.30 But neither is it the replacement

of the old with the new vanguard, an avant- garde 2.0, whereby “a tech-

nocratic class of resistors acts on behalf of ‘the people,’ ” a fantasy that,

Critical Art Ensemble explains, “seems every bit as suspect, although it

is not as fantastic as thinking that the people of the world will unite.”31

What is required, rather, is a multitude of different creative agents, a

multitude that fuses or is situated between the individual and the collec-

tive.32 On this note, the work of artist collectives in particular allows us

to think about the emancipatory potential of sociality and cooperation.

iNtroductioN 11

As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe, immaterial labor directly

involves social interaction; in this sense, cooperation is not imposed

from outside but emerges from within. To continue along these lines,

we might think about the double- sided quality of the labor of program-

mers and technocrats: on the one hand it is a means of economic value,

but on the other it can be a source of subversive, if not revolutionary,

potentiality.

Lovink and David Garcia together argue that tactical media are not

mired in the position of the oppositional or the minoritarian.33 Tactical

media events and projects, and the moments of dissent and critique they

produce, are not simply oppositional because there is no definitive “they”

to confront. They also cannot easily inhabit an oppositional stance be-

cause— as we will see in examples ranging from an intervention in the

game space of America’s Army and corporate- sponsored visualizations

of stock market data— tactical media are “forced to operate within the

parameters of global capitalism,” or, in Critical Art Ensemble’s terms, in

the “pool of liquid power.”34 These artist- activists thus critique and resist

the new world order but do so from within by intervening on the site

of symbolic systems of power: networks of finance, technologies of war,

even, as in the case of the Yes Men, corporate conferences. This is more

than Dadaist provocation, however, and not simply a variant of a radi-

cal art practice that endeavors to disrupt sociopolitical, economic, and

cultural structures. Their campaigns comprise little tactics rather than

bold strategies, but paradoxically we might understand their efforts by

turning to a theorist of 4GW (fourth- generation warfare), John Robb:

“To global guerillas, the point of greatest emphasis is the systempunkt.

It is a point in the system . . . usually identified by one of the many au-

tonomous groups in the field, that will collapse the target system if it

is destroyed. Within an infrastructure system, this collapse takes the

form of disrupted flows that result in financial loss or supply shortages.

Within a market, the result is a destabilization of the psychology of the

marketplace that will introduce severe inefficiencies and chaos.”35 One

of the premises of my study is that this articulation of dynamic, decen-

tralized, and bottom- up resilience has become paradigmatic for netwar,

activist movements, and the academy. Witness the central statement in

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit: “Protocological

iNtroductioN12

struggles do not center around changing existent technologies but in-

stead involve discovering holes in existent technologies and projecting

potential change through those holes. Hackers call these holes ‘exploits.’ ”36

Whether oriented toward systempunkt or exploit, tactical media comes

so close to its core informational and technological apparatuses that

protest in a sense becomes the mirror image of its object, its aesthetic

replicatory and reiterative rather than strictly oppositional. As we will

see, then, tactical media’s imagination of an outside, a space exterior

to neoliberal capitalism, is not spatial but temporal. So, informed by

Critical Art Ensemble’s understanding of power as diffused, networked,

multiple, and a- territorial, tactical media do not necessarily evade the

us- them dialectic, but they do recast it such that “us” and “them” are no

longer permanently situated.

To articulate tactical media in terms of performance rather than as

static art object emphasizes viewer experience and engagement. Tactical

media is thus relational in the terms Nicolas Bourriaud has outlined, like

much contemporary art activity, in that it takes “as its theoretical hori-

zon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than

the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”37 Among

its many subjects, then, is the sphere of human relations, moments of

social encounter and moments of direct address and engagement with

the viewer. Moreover, the performance paradigm allows CAE and other

tactical media practitioners to conceive of “participants” as a flexible

rather than fixed role, encompassing both artists— cultural workers—

and viewers. To conceive of tactical media in terms of performance is

to point to a fluidity of its actants, to emphasize its ephemerality, and

to shift the weight of emphasis slightly to the audience, which does not

simply complete the signifying field of the work but records a memory of

the performance. And here we must once again place tactical media in

the context of Bourriaud’s commentary on contemporary relational art,

to stress that the audience is an analytic category, singular yet multiple,

heterogeneous rather than homogeneous, an experiential rather than on-

tological entity. As Bourriaud explains, “the audience concept must not

be mythicized— the idea of a unified ‘mass’ has more to do with a Fascist

aesthetic than with these momentary experiences, where everyone has

to hang on to his/her identity. It is a matter of predefined coding and

iNtroductioN 13

restricted to a contract, and not a matter of a social binding hardening

around totems of identity.”38 The audience concept is thus as flexible and

ephemeral as the artistic activity itself. Tactical media is performance

for which a consumable product is not the primary endgame; it fore-

grounds the experiential over the physical. It “leaves few material traces.

As the action comes to an end, what is left is primarily living memory.”39

Hacktivist tactics such as FloodNet, as we will see in chapter 1, leave

material traces of their operation in server logs; however, as Critical Art

Ensemble explains, “traces and residues are far less problematic than

strategic products, which come to dominate the space in which they are

placed.”40

If there is to be no strategic product, no manifesto, and even no to-

tality, what, then, is the task of this book? For practitioners of tactical

media, shifting from strategy to tactics is important because it renders

the phenomenon of resistance fleeting, ephemeral, and subject to con-

tinual morphing. The swarming operations of flash mobs provide an an-

alogue: media artist- activists gain access to a server, a URL, or a game

space; perform an intervention; and then just as suddenly disperse. What

has to be acknowledged, though, is that the critical operation makes vis-

ible, stabilizes, and even concretizes a set of projects for which ephemer-

ality and mutability are not only part of the epistemology of the work but

also a means of functioning. To some degree, this book will take what are

diverse, “deliberately slippery,” and heterogeneous practices— and what

is a stratified political movement— and make them cohere. The tactics

of tactical media are not homogeneous, but in the act of assembly, I will

provide a certain coherence that these projects may resist. Lovink, after

all, notes that “tactical media are not so much in need of theories or Big

Ideas. . . . There is no ‘World Federation of Tactical Media.’ ”41 One must

therefore pose the question: is there a lurking danger in bringing tactics

into visibility, in making stable that which maintains a kind of power by

being unstable? Is there a contradiction between my methodology and

the tactics I describe? An initial response, both pragmatic and prosaic,

is to note that there is not necessarily a way out of this problem: a critical

text, after all, demands a certain coherence, and therefore all one can do

is point to the contradiction between the critical act and the heteroge-

neous and even subscopic aspects of the projects under discussion. There

iNtroductioN14

are, however, other strategies: one might place tactical media under

erasure or perhaps develop a methodology and a mode of critical writing

that contains within it a kind of instability, such as Matthew Fuller was

able to do in his magisterial Media Ecologies, which performatively ren-

ders his media objects fundamentally unstable, such that neither critic

nor reader can get a definitive fix on them.

But we can find a better answer to this question within the works of

tactical media themselves, which are more interested in repurposing,

modifying, and disrupting than they are in remaining invisible. They

are invested in stability, at least insofar as they want to have a material

effect on the world, however temporary and provisional, which is to say

that their object is not exactly formlessness and uncontainability. In fact,

in that their tinkering, playing, and visualizing are themselves a kind of

academic criticism, they are not so far removed from my own discourse.

That is, these artist- activists may not necessarily be invested in the idea

of a fundamental structural transformation, but they are invested in cul-

tural critique, itself invested with a transformative power that may not

be immediately perceptible but in which one must place a certain belief.

And cultural critique, insofar as it abstracts and generalizes, itself allows

for the formation of a provisionally stable descriptive category: abstrac-

tion is one means of establishing temporary, non essential, even tactical

commonality among art practices as disparate as distributed denial- of-

service attacks and information visualization. This commonality does

not suggest homogeneity; rather, abstraction forges a set of tactical links

that do not collapse the differences among different projects, practices,

and investments.

The initial development of tactical media was coterminous with the

development of information technologies and the subsequent dot- com

boom— this is the era of the first Next Five Minutes (N5M) conferences—

but the war on terror, the expansion of financial capitalism, and the in-

tensified implementation of neoliberal policies in the opening years of

the twenty- first century have given rise to what I read as a more fluid,

extensive, and thereby more powerful set of art- activist practices. It is

therefore not simply critical license that allows me to see beyond the

era of tactical gizmology and to discover a range of new media art prac-

iNtroductioN 15

tices with clear sociopolitical engagements. In the pages that follow, I

showcase different projects on topics such as territorial borders, war,

and finance capital. Such a structure cannot hope to be comprehensive;

rather, it is representative and illustrative. The projects I discuss are not

isolate or discrete but intricately linked: the voice of dissent is not alone

in the wilderness of the art world, somehow external to its primary in-

stitutions, but is growing into a resounding chorus. What might seem to

be the presentist quality of my discussion— many of the projects I dis-

cuss are mere months old— is counterbalanced by an attention to the

rich history of interventionist art practices that inform tactical media.

It is further counterbalanced by a sociology- of- knowledge approach that

outlines the conditions to which tactical media projects respond.

Tactical Gizmology

In the age of the network society, a range of new media activities have been

written under the sign of the tactical: TXTMobs; contestational robotics

(LittleBrother); hacktivism (encompassing practices such as electronic

civil disobedience, distributed denial- of- service attacks, and campaigns

by the Electronic Frontier Foundation);42 alternative or independent

media; clicktivism (Moveon.org); peer- to- peer network building; virtual

communities (WELL, BBS); laboratories (Makrolab); open- source soft-

ware platforms; anticorporate parody (Yes Men, 0100101110101101.ORG);

cybersquatting (Etoy, Vaticano.org);43 modding; and Life hacks (the dis-

semination of instructions about how to hack the iPhone or how to plant

herbicide- resistant seeds). One might think, then, that this is an analytic

and artistic category designating all technology- based activism. But in

my analysis, tactical media is also the rubric for work that does not eas-

ily fit within the activism category, whose political critique is subtle, not

immediately obvious, even covert.

The true departure from this earlier wave of tactical media can be

achieved by revisiting Michel de Certeau, whose theorizing of tactics and

strategy in The Practice of Everyday Life deeply informs Lovink, Critical

Art Ensemble, and others writing about tactical media in the 1990s and

extending through the publication of a special issue of the journal Subsol

iNtroductioN16

on the topic in 2002.44 On the whole, from this critical discourse we get

the sense that “tactical media” ought exclusively to mean the use of low-

or no- tech tools as a mode of protest against governmental, corporate,

and biopolitical structures of control. In my view, we can take a more ex-

pansive view than that of DIY and protests articulated via billboards and

simple scripts, although such tactics still require our critical attention.

Put simply, de Certeau’s neat alignment of users and tactics, producers

and strategy, is complicated by tactical media practitioners who write

their own scripts and build their own gadgets. Tactics, that is, are tools

for users who are also producers. As the Tactical Media Crew explains,

“Tactical Media are what happens when cheap ‘do it yourself ’ media

made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics are exploited

by those who are outside of the normal hierarchies of power and knowl-

edge.”45 Thus does the Institute for Applied Autonomy hail the new mod-

els of technical expertise: “Praise be to the tinkerers, to the toy makers,

and to the amateurs. New versions of expertise must be constructed.”46

Such tinkering might include Critical Art Ensemble’s hacking of a

Nintendo Game Boy to produce Super Kid Fighter, a text- based role-

playing game modeled on Wilhelm Reich’s writing about children’s sex-

ual rights. In the new game space, players have to ditch school, sell drugs,

and engage in other criminal activities to fulfill the objective, which is to

gain admission to the town’s brothel. The purpose of this reengineering

is to counter what the artists regard as the false Puritanism in the U.S.

social context (the mass hysteria about children seeing Janet Jackson’s

breast, for example). We will see a different kind of re engineering at work

in my second chapter, where I discuss Joseph DeLappe’s intervention in

the game space of America’s Army, with the result that it temporarily

functions not as a game of military valorization but as a game of mourn-

ing. What both modes of reengineering indicate is the extent to which

tactical media operates both at the level of technological apparatus and

at the level of content and representation. It is not simply about reappro-

priating the instrument but also about reengineering semiotic systems

and reflecting critically on institutions of power and control. The work

of the Preemptive Media collective— which informs and deforms mobile

digital technologies such as RFID, Wi- Fi, and bar codes— is particularly

iNtroductioN 17

apposite here. Preemptive Media’s object is to exploit consumer elec-

tronics for a larger purpose, not only to instruct users and consumers but

also to foster critical consciousness and a kind of low- tech amateurism.

In one representative performance, Swipe (2002–2005), the collective

installed a bar at a media arts event and scanned the driver’s licenses

of all the bar patrons, producing a visualization of the data along with

individual receipts detailing each patron’s demographics including in-

come, profession, and consumer habits.47 The idea behind this activity

was to encourage consumer awareness of processes of automated identi-

fication data collection (AIDC) and to encourage a critical conversation

about privacy, surveillance, and data mining. As the setting indicates,

Swipe functioned within a social, rather than private, symbolic realm,

its relational aesthetic true to Nicolas Bourriaud’s vision of an artistic

praxis that struggles against the reifying and commodifying of social

relations. It is in this sense that readers can understand my expansion

of the category of tactical media beyond a narrow focus on tactical giz-

mology, such that it might also encompass practices such as artistic data

visualization.

A strong emphasis on DIY drives the work of tactical gizmologists: in

an updating of Alan Kay, the mantra is “Give every user her tool and show

her how to work it.” It makes intuitive sense, then, that the Electronic

Civil Disobedience group— which I discuss at length in my first chapter—

not only encourages users to participate in distributed denial- of- service

actions but also encourages them to modify the script. Given this ap-

preciation of tinkering and production, and given, too, the powerful cul-

tural and economic force of open- source movements, we might expect

the current generation of new media art- activists to place a premium

on code and invite user participation that was also pedagogical. As we

will see, however, this is not necessarily the case. A brief return to Josh

On’s They Rule will be instructive: unlike the work of Bureau d’Etudes,

which provides visual analyses of financial capitalism and contemporary

political networks, users of They Rule are allowed to create their own

cartographic structures.48 We work within the parameters of They Rule

but not at the level of its code. Tactical media practitioners, then, are not

code workers whose raison d’être is the revealing of the symbolic, and at

iNtroductioN18

times actual, conditions of production. None of the game or visualiza-

tion interfaces that I discuss in this book make visible the underlying

streams of encoded information except in representative form; that is,

the encoded information is only present as something else, for example,

the gamelike creatures representing national currencies in John Klima’s

ecosystm, which features prominently in my third chapter. Our limited

engagement, then, is part of the epistemology of tactical media: we are

meant to interact and engage while simultaneously becoming aware of

our own limitations and our own inability to make an immediately per-

ceptible impact on the project as it stands in for the socioeconomic and

political system.

Despite the expansive title, then, the project of this book is not to ar-

chive all those cultural productions, works, and practices that profess or

otherwise support a radical politics. In that sense it differs from projects

such as The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption

of Everyday Life, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art ex-

hibition and corresponding book documenting public- space and street-

based performances.49 As the title might indicate, de Certeau provides a

crucial theoretical lens through which to view the tactics of artists such

as the Yes Men, Reverend Billy, the Surveillance Camera Players, and the

Biotic Pie Brigade. Their interventions are also situated in the tradition

of the Situationists, with their two tactics of detourné and dérive, and

the culture jamming of the yippies. The works I engage differ not only

with respect to medium but also in tone: there are aspects of humor and

parody present in some of the games and installations I discuss, surely,

but the payoff is not exclusively the trick or the prank.50

A case in point is the “digital hijacks” of the überprovocateur Hans

Bernhard, one of the founders of Etoy and Ubermorgen.com, the art col-

lective responsible for projects such as “Vote- Auction” (slogan: “Bringing

Capitalism and Democracy Closer Together”), “Injunction Generator,”

and “Google Will Eat Itself.”51 Ubermorgen’s latest subversive happen-

ing is Amazon Noir: The Big Book Crime (November 2006), a hijack of

Amazon’s “search inside” tool that both violated and critically reflected

on digital copyright. With the assistance of Alessandro Ludovico and

Paolo Cirio, Ubermorgen produced a software bot (“foolingware”) that

iNtroductioN 19

outwitted Amazon’s search feature by making five thousand to ten thou-

sand search inquiries per book and reassembling the individual parts

into a complete text. Users were then able to “legally” copy and distrib-

ute copyrighted books: between April and October 2006, over three

thousand books were distributed through peer- to- peer networks such as

BitTorrent.52 In the end, the artists, the self- described “bad guys” in this

particular scenario of media hacking, were of course threatened with

legal action; Amazon bought the Amazon Noir software, and the two

parties settled out of court with a nondisclosure agreement. What re-

mains of the hijack are an abstract diagram of the software bot and pdf

files of some half- dozen books, among them Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This

Book. Their political point is as manifest as the genre of noir would indi-

cate. But to recognize the intellectual lineage and philosophical content

of this collective’s work, one need only look at their name: Ubermorgen,

after all, means “the day after tomorrow” or “super- tomorrow.”53

Data Visualization as Tactical Media

Three world maps are aligned on the opening screen of the digital art-

ist John Klima’s Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain: one politi-

cal, one topographical, another emotional. Color- coded in accordance

with data culled from the United Nations, the U.S. Geological Survey,

and the World Health Organization, respectively, the three maps regis-

ter global reports of human rights abuse, geophysical data, and life ex-

pectancy statistics.54 The cartographic display, which is interactive and

three- dimensional, renders the political and emotional components of

individual lives in different colors and tonalities and makes it possible

to compare incidents of UN- classified political oppression and life ex-

pectancy. Klima describes the work: “Frequently, we use the metaphor

of a landscape to describe a seemingly unrelated human condition, be

it political or personal. . . . I decided to create a series of global terrains

that relate to the aforementioned metaphors. . . . The result is a compel-

ling visual comparison and representation of a particularly intriguing

source dataset.”55 His methodology for the graphing component of the

project is the A* (A- star) algorithm used for artificial intelligence and

iNtroductioN20

the gaming industry. This algorithm allows a character or sprite to avoid

artificial and physical obstacles and navigate the most efficient solution

path through a terrain, which creates the appearance of intelligence.56

In the context of this work by Klima, the A* algorithm functions as a

graphing technique that produces a visual analysis of the data sets and

makes the links among them paradoxically concrete. As a consequence,

biopolitics are rendered in the interface of the game.57 In Political Land­

scape, Emotional Terrain, “life” is brought into the arena of knowledge,

management, and calculation. The integrated maps register biopolitical

control of the individual body and of populations while also articulating

statistics as the mechanism of that control. They function as a visual

illustration of the modern Foucauldian regime of power, which is “situ-

ated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-

scale phenomena of population.”58 Occluded, but still suggested, by the

data Klima integrates into a global biopolitical terrain are the range and

proliferation of techniques required to coordinate control of the individ-

ual body and of the species body. The global management that Political

Landscape suggests has been accomplished by the instrumental ratio-

nalization of medical, economic, and political systems.

Klima’s aesthetic practices in computer media involve elements of

data and information visualization, interactive computer- animated 3- D

graphics, elementary robotics (using nonautonomous agents), gaming

John Klima, Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain, September 2002.

iNtroductioN 21

paradigms, and data manipulation.59 Like the network- based data vi-

sualization artwork of Lisa Jevbratt, Klima tends to focus on larger so-

cial processes rather than on real- time personal experiences.60 Klima’s

work revolves around representations of global events, processes, and

statistics. Working within a tradition of electronic art that takes data

as its material, signals that it then aestheticizes, modifies, interrupts,

negates, and returns, Klima’s particular source material includes finan-

cial market data and “terrain, topography, and geographic information

systems.”61 As he notes with regard to one of his recent works, Terrain

Machine, Klima works toward “an aesthetic investigation of the world

as it currently exists ‘in data.’ ”62 Such a project invites certain questions:

What does the aestheticizing of data ultimately reveal about that data?

How can one use data maps and visualizations to think about causes and

material effects? In a data visualization project, especially using the data

of global finance and the statistics of global control, what aesthetic does

one produce? Is it simply replicatory or reiterative of the logic of the con-

trol society and of neoliberal globalization?63 I suggest that the visual

spectacles Klima produces are subversive of the technicity and techno-

logical rationality inherent in statistical calculation and that they are

also generated by a practice and an operation that produces an aesthetic.

This aesthetic is grounded in the material realities of global capitalism

and the global language of statistics, risk, and probability.

Because the data are not continually updated and are thereby static,

Political Landscape does not immediately register continuous control,

monitoring, or assessment. However, particularly when read in the con-

text of Klima’s related projects— The Great Game, which translated daily

Department of Defense records of the Afghanistan bombing campaign

into the interface of a topographical game, and ecosystm, which ani-

mates real- time currency exchange rates— this project does suggest an

increasingly complex, invasive, and integrated regime of control. The au-

thority of disciplinary institutions (school, factory, prison) is no longer

temporally and spatially limited by these institutions; it is not owned or

bounded but administered. Control is dispersive rather than concentra-

tive; it works by communication rather than by confinement. One does

not need to look to the Department of Homeland Security to recognize

iNtroductioN22

that we are now in a moment marked by new structures of continuous

oversight and what Gilles Deleuze calls “open circuits” of control. In-

deed, the administrative control of information requires immediately

executable, incessant, and flexible strategies of surveillance. One differ-

ence between the two orders of society, according to Gilles Deleuze in

his reading of the problematic in Foucault, is that control “is short- term

and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded,

whereas discipline was long- term, infinite, and discontinuous.”64 Control

is constantly subject to reconstitution, its indexes of command contin-

gent, its structure neither fixed nor stable. The figure for the control

society is the snake rather than the mole, which would suggest non-

destinational movement rather than a teleology. And the machine that

expresses the social forms of the control society is the computer. Many

of Klima’s digital art projects, particularly ecosystm, function as visual

illustrations and supplementary figures of this metastable control sys-

tem. Here and in subsequent chapters, I offer an integrative reading of

Klima’s style, practice, aesthetic, and political project as contemporane-

ous with its moment: exemplary of the tele- visioning and projecting of

the world through the computer screen and illustrative of certain discur-

sive features of globalization.

In a different context, but on the theme of the abstraction of num-

bers, Fernando Coronil has aligned the global market with globalcentric

discourses in their mutual technological rationalization, which reduces

material things to numbers. The distillation of the West into abstract

financial networks, Coronil suggests, has contributed to the occlusion

of “real” modalities of power.65 The global market functions as an al-

legory for his reading of the effects of globalcentric discourses because

it absorbs the commodity as a thing and transforms it into a historical

entity of the stock market. This transformation erases the commodity’s

“proper” identity and converts its qualitative value into the quantitative.

To a certain extent, Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain provides

a visual representation of this logic of the global market, the transfor-

mation of material bodies into statistics, assets, even geometric icons.

However, in that Klima uses official data sets that generate symbolic

representational systems, these systems are not simulacral. But the work

indeed registers the extent to which the “real” modalities of power are

eclipsed and evacuated by figures and data streams.

iNtroductioN 23

Klima’s Political Landscape highlights the very space between the

meta- geophysical and the geophysical, the virtual and the real. The map’s

continents, in other words, operate in both registers by recording that

which is invisible to, if not evacuated by, the global statistic. Gathering

together the whole of North America under the lowest possible statisti-

cal incidence of human rights abuse, for example, the monochromatic

spaces on the map have an attendant homogenizing force and power of

occlusion. The telecontinental map announces the remainder, through

its absence, as that which cannot be discursively captured or managed.

Even as it gestures toward totalization, the statistic must necessarily re-

main incomplete, an incompleteness emphasized in Klima’s data visual-

ization project.

To speak of the political- aesthetic work of data visualization, we thus

need to acknowledge a distinction between functional or pragmatic vi-

sualization on the one hand and artistic visualization on the other.66 The

difference is not in aesthetic— many transportation maps are nothing if

not beautiful, and the power of They Rule is less visual than conceptual—

but rather in intentionality, procedure, and self- reflexivity. Artistic visu-

alizations do not proceed from the assumption that data are neutral;

in fact, one of the desired effects is often that the viewer will recognize

the gaps and perspective embedded not only in the data but in any act

of calculation. In that sense, artistic visualizations are fundamentally

perspectival, and here we can remember one of Lovink and Garcia’s

comments: “Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never

impartial they always participate.”67 If their use of persuasive rhetoric is

subtle and they do not themselves make overt arguments, these works of

tactical cartography give the users all the tools necessary to map struc-

tures of capital, power, and influence (John On’s visualizations).

In data visualization projects, the data bear an ideological valence

recorded in the art. These works rely on the real elements from which

the statistics are drawn, but they also critique both their ideology and

source. If the data are flawed, these works document and critique that

flaw by rendering the data in other forms. They visualize and material-

ize the data so as to give it a kind of ideological and political impact that

it might not otherwise have. Witness Valdis Krebs’s political book net-

work, a visualization of Amazon.com purchases from January 2003 that

iNtroductioN24

divide almost precisely into “red” and “blue” categories, two communities

of readers linked only by their common investment in one book: Bernard

Lewis’s What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in

the Middle East.68 Visualizations such as I discuss here do not inter-

rupt the flows of informational capitalism as much as they interpret

and represent the integrative alliances among finance capitalism and

bio political regimes of control. It is perhaps in this respect that we might

discern the metapolitical content of their art.

Virtuosity

Storming the Winter Palace is no longer an option, as has frequently been

noted, but what would be its postimperial equivalent? Michael Hardt and

Antonio Negri have argued that older modes of political organization

have become obsolete partly because of the linear structure that traces

the progression of struggle from the moment of insurrection to the form-

ing of political vanguards, or “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”69 But

would contemporary forms of revolutionary resistance, or revolutionary

becoming, as they are articulated in the work of tactical media, also run

the risk of vanguardism in the guise of the Netzvolk, the digerati, the

cognitariat, the hacker class, the virtual class— however one is to articu-

late the new proletariat class of the symbolic economy?70 Perhaps the no-

tion that revolutionary resistance no longer requires a single spatiality,

Valdis Krebs, “Political Patterns on the W W W.”

iNtroductioN 25

or Foucault’s notion that “there is no single locus of great Refusal,” means

that power will not, cannot, reconstitute either on- site or in the hands

of a limited few. If we have only a “plurality of resistances,” a “being-

against,” always and everywhere (with echoes of Trotsky’s Permanent

Revolution and Snowball’s continual rebellions diff icult to overlook),

then in fact the teleology of revolutionary organization itself is disrupt-

ed.71 Instead of a single, spectacular disruption, we have a “multiplicity

of discontinuous sites of enunciation.”72

The models of resistance, dissent, and “being- against” articulated by

tactical media do not adhere to the ideology of the “wired” Left (e.g.,

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker), which draws explicitly on twentieth-

century traditions of activism and social protest. Neither do they adhere

to the ideology of the cyberlibertarians, who have been active in public-

policy debates about censorship, privacy, and intellectual property and

tend to focus on individual freedom rather than social justice.73 Instead

we can locate in the work of these new media artist- activists a kind of

virtuosity that is also a politics: political activity that would supplement

but not displace other forms, modes, and practices of politico- aesthetic

engagement in the network society, specifically refusal, destructivity,

cyber activism, and hacktivism.

After Hardt and Negri’s Empire, the paradigmatic figure of refusal

and exodus would no doubt be Bartleby, whose refusal is one of eva-

sion and withdrawal rather than of confrontation. His refrain “I would

prefer not to” is passive but not without menace. It is expressive of dig-

nity yet still announces a power held over him. The refrain cedes power

but retains the power to withhold. As the neoliberal state began fully to

emerge in the 1980s, Hakim Bey fired an even closer shot across the bow:

“Refusal of Work can take the forms of absenteeism, on- job drunken-

ness, sabotage, and sheer inattention— but it can also give rise to new

modes of rebellion: more self- employment, participation in the ‘black’

economy and ‘lavoro nero,’ welfare scams and other criminal options,

pot farming, etc.— all more or less ‘invisible’ activities compared to tra-

ditional leftist confrontational tactics such as the general strike.”74 And

now, Maurizio Lazzarato explains how refusal plays out in the context of

Workerism and attendant revolutionary praxis: “These social struggles

and ‘invisible’ behaviors engage both in direct, molar confrontations

iNtroductioN26

with the apparatuses of power and strategies of withdrawal, flight and

circumvention. In the same way, they alternatively articulate strategies

of both separation and ‘mediation,’ both negotiation and refusal.”75 Fi-

nally, Alan Liu updates the industrial- age gesture of refusal to the post-

industrial cubicle and locates dissent in the ethos of cool:

There are only two equivocal ways that the archaic and the unreasonable can

protest their submission to the new rationalization. One is to quit and move

to another job, which exactly reproduces the conditions of mobility, modular-

ity, and random access that support the “flexibility” and “centralization” of

postindustrialism. The other way is just as conflicted: to express in lifestyle

and, increasingly, in what I have called “workstyle” the enormous reserve of

petty kink that Processed World called “bad attitude” but that now appears

with mind- numbing regularity in popular culture, the media, and the Web

as “cool.”76

The law of cool, then, is “the ‘gesture’ of ambivalent, recusant opposi-

tionality (not quite a ‘statement,’ ‘expression,’ or even ‘representation’ of

defiance) within knowledge work.”77 The coolest ideology of art within

the culture of information is “destructive creativity,” of which hacking

would be one logical extension.

As we will see in chapter 1, hacktivist tactics of the Electronic Civil

Disobedience movement, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, and the

Zapatistas (Floodnet applications that produced pseudo–error mes-

sages such as “human rights not found on this server”) correspond to,

and are occasionally informed by, Deleuze’s notion of the event. To pre-

cipitate an event is to act without knowing the situation into which one

will be propelled, to change things as they exist: “For a while, they have

a real rebellious spontaneity. . . . Events can’t be explained by the situa-

tions that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear for

a moment, and it’s that moment that matters, it’s the chance we must

seize. . . . If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however in-

conspicuous, that elude control.”78 The event is unpredictable; it is not

fixable or determinable. It becomes history only after its rupture. There

is a certain skepticism within new media studies toward activist prac-

tices modeled on the structure of the event.79 The unpredictable event

troubles the teleology of class struggle; from that perspective, it is per-

haps too messianic, the notion that revolutionary change, if it comes at

iNtroductioN 27

all, depends on the unforeseen too troubling. From the perspective of

transvergence, as Marcos Novak has described it, the event might be

too deeply embedded in— because it is constituted by— the disciplin-

ary language of philosophy and would thereby inhibit the emergence of

truly transdisciplinary collaborative practices. But there are intersec-

tions between the structure of the event and self- organizing new media

works that are open to the unexpected, both programmed and non-

programmed in the sense that they are open to a nonpredictable future.

From the perspective of a tactical media practitioner, the belief in this

temporal opening to a better tomorrow makes the question of immedi-

ate efficacy less pronounced. A skeptic might wonder what difference a

temporary disturbance makes, but for tactical media there is a certain

power in the spontaneous eruption, the momentary evasion of protoco-

logical control structures, the creation of temporary autonomous zones,

that surely play their part in making possible the opening for political

transformations.

It is in this sense that we might understand why the rhetoric of eman-

cipatory human agency is largely absent from the projects featured in

this book. They are not mired in the present, but neither do they fully

invest in the kind of imaginary and prescriptive social engineering that

one finds in a utopian text. Instead their sense of historical time is un-

predictable, open, contingent, variable. Responding to Jean- François

Lyotard’s lament that postmodern architecture has been forced to aban-

don the project of fundamental structural transformation for the proj-

ect of “minor modifications,” or what we might call tinkering, Bourriaud

articulates the aesthetico- political rationale of contemporary art praxis

in terms absolutely applicable to tactical media. Art in the present mo-

ment, he explains, is “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, in-

stead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical

evolution. Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imagi-

nary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models

of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the art-

ist.”80 With the recognition that there is no getting outside the global

techno- military- economic world order, tactical media thus performs a

sociopolitical intervention by gesturing only obliquely toward a better

world in the future, its vision of tomorrow much like that offered at the

iNtroductioN28

end of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men: a boat fleetingly visible on the

horizon and detached from any concrete articulation of an ideal political

community or certain historical destiny.

That said, the crushing experience of a seemingly permanent war on

terror, alongside Halliburton- Enron economics (and we could continue

the list), has been sufficient to squash even the staunchest of affirma-

tive beliefs, so it is not surprising that Lovink would come eventually to

regard tactical media with a great deal more pessimism. In 2005, with

Ned Rossiter, he writes:

Tactical media too often assume to reproduce the curious spatio- temporal dy-

namic and structural logic of the modern state and industrial capital: differ-

ence and renewal from the peripheries. But there’s a paradox at work here. Dis-

ruptive as their actions may often be, tactical media corroborate the temporal

mode of post- Fordist capital: short- termism. . . . This is why tactical media

are treated with a kind of benign tolerance. There is a neurotic tendency to

disappear. Anything that solidifies is lost in the system. The ideal is to be little

more than a temporary glitch, a brief instance of noise or interference. Tactical

media set themselves up for exploitation in the same manner that “modders”

do in the game industry: both dispense with their knowledge of loop holes in

the system for free. They point out the problem, and then run away. Capital is

delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd- modder for the home

improvement.81

A comparative analysis of the earlier “ABC of Tactical Media” manifesto

(1997) and this manifesto for organized networks reveals a similar in-

vestment in dissensus rather than the overly idealistic consensus. It also

reveals a subjective, rather than objective, reappraisal of the logic of tac-

tical media. It is not that its functioning has changed in the intervening

years but that the perception of its power and efficacy has changed: what

was once “provisional” and “flexible response” is now regarded as “short-

termism.” While I am less certain about the definitive claim that capi-

talism is always able to erase the possibilities for political re purposing,

I would acknowledge that Lovink and Rossiter make a strong point in

their critique. Their emphasis on perspectival, subjective truths about

tactical media, however, reminds us of the integral role that the audi-

ence has to play. The right question to ask is not whether tactical media

works or not, whether it succeeds or fails in spectacular fashion to ef-

iNtroductioN 29

fect structural transformation; rather, we should be asking to what ex-

tent it strengthens social relations and to what extent its activities are

virtuosic.

What I wish now to point to is a correlation between tactical media

as performance and what Paolo Virno has theorized as virtuosity. Vir-

tuosity necessarily partakes of the same underlying unpredictability

that constitutes the structure of the event. In his analysis of the mul-

titude, Virno explains that virtuosity is “activity which finds its own

fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself

into an end product, without settling into a ‘finished product,’ or into an

object which would survive the performance.” Unlike the plastic arts,

where what survives the artist is a material product, virtuosity exists

as performance or in the traces of performance it leaves. Because the

performance does not result in an end product, the activity of the vir-

tuoso requires the performance of an audience to witness and record

a memory of her achievement. It is in this sense that the performance

as such “makes sense only if it is seen or heard.”82 Virno here draws on

Hannah Arendt in noting the affinity between performing artists and

politics: both need “a publicly organized space for their ‘work,’ and both

depend upon others for the performance itself.”83 Virno pushes further

to note that “all virtuosity is intrinsically political.”84 In my view, tacti-

cal media projects share with performing artists and political actions

a sense of contingency in that they too are performed “on the fly” and

require the presence and response of a user to complete their signifying

fields. It is in this respect that we can understand the foregrounding of

technique and technological expertise, which might initially appear to

frustrate attempts to situate these works in relation to a social context

and which also seems instead to invest in what Pierre Bourdieu calls a

“pure aesthetic.”85

Entered into fashion shows with the slogan “Precarity Is in Fashion,”

the Japanese designer Serpica Naro emerged on the metaphoric stage

with the provocative question “Why save the world when we can design

it?” Serpica Naro— an anagram of San Precario— was a brand itself de-

signed, as it were, by Milanese precarity activists to stage a disruptive

protest during fashion week. In general terms, precarity is the name

iNtroductioN30

given to life without security, certainty, or predictability, life that is essen-

tially subject to financial markets. More specifically, precarity identifies

uncertainty as the fundamental condition of labor in the postindustrial

moment. It is the name given to intermittent work, work without stabil-

ity and a living wage, a category of temporary labor that links together

chain workers, service workers, and knowledge workers.86 In response

to the ideologies of corporate creativity and innovation, which imagine

a flexible, modular, streamlined, and mobile workforce capable of rapid-

fire response to competition, precarity activists speak to the material

conditions of unemployment, job security, and social exclusion in the

contemporary moment. That the Milanese precarity activists should en-

gage these issues through the medium of design and performance, in ad-

dition to traditional organizational models, suggests a certain cultural

logic. The event of the fashion show was an elaborate hoax: the activists’

“actual” protest was staged via fake threats and protests against the de-

signer, thus necessitating protection and a strong police presence at the

event, the simulation of danger and insecurity thus negating the very

distinction on which the law is based. This tactic of placing design at the

center of political engagement truly is, as Serpica Naro promises, the

triumph of creativity over insecurity.

The practice of designing rather than saving the world is another

model of political engagement that has elements of destructivity (it often

participates in a similar poetics of interference and interruption) and

ele ments of other modes of political organization that depend on collec-

tivity and solidarity. The degree of ethical concern in the works I discuss

in this book should no doubt not be underestimated, but perhaps it could

be suggested that their politics are a metapolitics. However, the unavoid-

ably cynical conclusion is that, while their critical practices do not have

the hollowness or emptiness of Space Invaders— the paradigmatic scene

of the individual fighting back against a relentless and formless enemy—

at times they participate in the same solitary, and sedentary, aesthetic.

31

No cultural bunker is ever fully secure. We can trespass in them all,

inventing molecular interventions and unleashing semiotic shocks

that collectively could negate the rising intensity of authoritarian

culture.

—­critical­art­eNSemble,­digital­resistance

Hacking is understood as the penetration, exploration or investiga-

tion of a system with the goal of understanding it, not of destroying

it, and that is exactly what we are trying to do: to understand the

border, to know what it represents and to become aware of the role

that we play in it. All this with the goal of improving the relations

between two worlds (the first and the third), Mexico and the U.S.

—­borderhack!­manifesto

Symbolic Performances

Leading up to Labor Day 2005, the Department of Ecological Author-

ing Tactics, Inc., launched a border disturbance action with the yellow

Cau tion signs mounted along the San Diego area highways.1 Introduced

in the early 1990s, the signs were intended to warn drivers about the

possibility of immigrants trying to cross the busy highways before bor-

der checkpoints. DoEAT’s intervention was to defamiliarize the iconic

silhouettes of three running figures, surprising drivers with the new

titles: “Wanted,” “Free Market,” “No Benefits,” and “Now Hiring.” Re-

ducing the plurality of migrants to the singular family made more sym-

pathetic by the inclusion of a young girl, the icon itself eliminated the

verbosity of the former signs’ labels (“Caution Watch for People Cross-

ing Road”) and made the anonymous swarms said to be “flooding” or

“pouring” over the border into a more manageable unit. In the wake of

Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and the construction of the “Iron Curtain,”

1. Border Hacks: Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Immigration

border­HackS32

the fourteen- mile San Diego–Tijuana border fence, highway deaths are

no longer as common as they once were— the scene of death has shifted

eastward to the deserts and mountains— but the iconic signs remain,

indices of the borderlands of San Ysidro–Tijuana that have been appro-

priated for numerous parodic and commercial purposes.2 In the hands

of the DoEAT group, the signs were no longer simply cautionary warn-

ings; they became a tactical art performance enacted with a sense of

urgency that also resonates in the Spanglish wordplay in the group’s ac-

ronym: “do eet.” Reminiscent as it was of the Situationist technique of

détournement, DoEAT’s interruptive and resignifying art performance

commented on the neoliberal economic policies that compel the forced

movement of migrant labor.3 In its allusion to NAFTA and the “free mar-

ket” that opens the U.S.–Mexico border to commodities but reinforces its

closure to people, the DoEAT tactic was truly site specific, situated both

physically and socio culturally.4 Highlighting the disparity between the

mobility of capital and the immobility of people, the signs continue to

speak both to the conditions of labor (free market = wanted + now hiring

+ no benefits) and to the criminalization of border crossings (free mar-

ket + now hiring + no benefits = wanted). The circulation of goods and

capital has been enabled by the free trade agreement, the signs remind

us, but border security practices, particularly walls and fences, continue

to prohibit the circulation of people. At the new Iron Curtain, neoliberal

market ideologies of liquid, free- flowing capital and open borders for

commodities come up against new policing tactics to regulate the move-

ments of people.

DoEAT’s border disturbance action thus raises a crucial question at

the outset: in the new mode of Empire, have we in fact seen a fundamen-

tal shift from a territorial to a capitalist logic of power?5 We can start to

address this problem with a critical look at the reinforcement of territory

and national sovereignty along the U.S.–Mexico divide. There is a com-

plex history of securitization along this border, particularly complex with

respect to the calls to preserve or otherwise defend the sixty- six- mile

stretch in San Diego County, but it is the post- Gatekeeper period that

directly informs projects such as DoEAT’s.6 Beginning with the five- mile

stretch of Imperial Beach, rows of fencing and surveillance technologies

have been introduced on the San Ysidro–Tijuana border, pushing im-

border­HackS 33

migration further east into the more dangerous desert and mountain

areas.7 More than 3,500 people are reported to have died attempting to

cross into the United States since the implementation of Gatekeeper, far

more than the dozens killed trying to cross the San Diego highways, the

vagueness of both numbers speaking to the sense in which the migrants

are not granted the dignity of singularity either in life or in death.8 Art-

activist groups such as SWARM the Minutemen, which I will discuss

further, have made a conscious effort to record the names of those killed,

memorialization by naming such as one sees on the Vietnam Wall and

with the chairs of the Oklahoma City memorial; others have commemo-

rated and critically responded to the deaths by hanging replicas of cof-

f ins on the Mexican side of the fence.9 Criminalizing movement— the

visible manifestation of which would be miles of double and triple fenc-

ing, barbed wire, concrete pillars, light towers, helicopter patrols, and

video surveillance cameras— has also resulted in the Sisyphean task of

capture and return. Surely this massive investment in border control and

the assertion of territorial sovereignty, beginning again at precisely the

DoEAT, “CAUTION,” 2005.

border­HackS34

moment that NAFTA is signed, indicates if not a shift at least a complex

imbrication of territorial and capitalist logics of power.10 Further, the

development of a “virtual fence” with remote- detecting sensors, remote-

controlled cameras, and unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) along

the U.S.–Mexico divide, along with recent anti- immigration initiatives

in the United States and Secure Flight and other “trusted traveler” pro-

grams, reminds us of the intensification of both biometric and territorial

borders.11

The sheer numbers of those who do not register in biometric testing

or otherwise “slip through the fence” can only suggest an intensification,

rather than a true fortification or securitization, of borders.12 The new

Iron Curtain has hardly stopped migration north— indeed, by all ac-

counts, the numbers appear to be at a historic high— so what other pur-

poses does it serve? Étienne Balibar writes in a different context about

the symbolic power of “obsessive and showy security practices” at the

border, which are “designed, indeed, as much for shows as for real ac-

tion.”13 What would be the sociocultural function of such “shows”? Peter

Andreas’s important study Border Games: Policing the U.S.–Mexico

Divide provides some answers.14 Noting that “ ‘successful’ border man-

agement depends on successful image management [which] does not

necessarily correspond with levels of actual deterrence,” Andreas con-

cludes that border control is a “public performance for which the border

functions as a kind of political stage” (9). In other words, the performance

of security is more important than actual security, and the theatrical

serves as a substitute for the real. The miles of razor wire, the ubiquity of

“boots on the ground,” the air support— they are all material entities, but

they are also crucially part of what Andreas names as a “symbolic per-

formance.” “Border control efforts,” he explains, “are not only actions (a

means to a stated instrumental end) but also gestures that communicate

meaning” (11). If indeed it is the case that border control is an “escalat-

ing symbolic performance,” then we would also have to understand the

interventionist tactics of DoEAT and other art collectives in precisely

the same terms. Their battle is at once material and symbolic, fought on

the very “political stage” where power is exercised. Within a regime of

signs, then, the gesture of renaming the migrant family as “Wanted” is

as provocative and significant as it is clever.

border­HackS 35

Andreas’s thinking about the inverse relation between the “escalating

symbolic performance” of border control and “actual deterrence” reso-

nates with Ulrich Beck’s noted articulation of the central problem for

world risk society, which is “how to feign control over the uncontrollable.”15

As Beck notes, we have seen a shift from risks that can be calculated

and controlled and about which one can make decisions to uncontrol-

lable risks, which exceed rational calculation. The alarmist quality of

mainstream media news may make us feel as if risk has increased, but

in fact, Beck explains, risk has simply been spatially, temporally, and

socially unbounded. Pollution, climate change, infectious diseases: these

are risks that are no longer limited to region, territory, or nation- state

and are now spatially unbounded. Risks have become temporally un-

bounded in that we are not able accurately to predict future damage or

assess the long- term dangers of, for example, toxic materials or geneti-

cally modified foods. Last, responsibility for economic and environmen-

tal disasters can no longer be attributed with certainty to a single indi-

vidual; in this sense, risk is socially unbounded. We have only to think

of the Prestige oil spill off the coast of Spain in November 2002 as an

instance of the three- dimensional debounding of risk. As a result of this

debounding, Beck argues, “The hidden critical issue in world risk society

is how to feign control over the uncontrollable— in politics, law, science,

technology, economy, and everyday life.”16 How, then, does a nation- state

simulate control over the ultimately uncontrollable movement of people

across borders? With “symbolic performances,” military operations that

double as public relations campaigns.

And now the stage is set for my reading of a selection of new media

artworks and performances that critically respond to the securitization

of the U.S.–Mexico border. For the crucial problem is not whether we

can articulate an exclusive logic of power for our historical moment but

how we can understand the critical response to the manifestation and

material consequences of that power. As securitization procedures and

policies intensify, so, too, does the art- activist response, which gains not

only an urgency but also a critical sophistication. As symbolic analysts,

these artists are particularly well positioned to think about the deploy-

ment and manipulation of signs. Recognizing that their project of socio-

cultural and governmental critique is also “advertising,” the “corporate

border­HackS36

psychological warfare of perception management,” these artists, tactical

media practitioners all, engage in nothing less than a full- scale “PR war”

(Mediafilter.org). The Tactical Media Crew goes further to announce

a “guerilla information war, with no division between military and ci-

vilian participation.”17 Who better to inform such a campaign than the

Criti cal Art Ensemble, the preeminent tactical media practitioners who

for two decades have used theory and performance to alter our percep-

tions of normalized social practices? CAE’s intervention is defamiliar-

ization, to change the way we see the otherwise “transparent codes” of

Empire. In an interview, CAE outlines the work of all socially engaged art

practices: “Now domination is predominantly exercised through global

market mechanisms interconnected with a global communications and

information apparatus. Any type of resistant production of representa-

tion intervenes and reverse- engineers the displays, software, and hard-

ware of this apparatus.”18 Reverse engineering is most obviously at work

in the DoEAT highway sign performance and more subtly in the other

new media art projects I will discuss. What I will work to demonstrate is

the way in which these new media artists use the virtuality of their me-

dium to critique the immobility of material bodies. Their critique of the

neoliberal ideologies of free- flowing virtual capital is manifest in their

tactical use of the very technologies, techniques, and tools that late capi-

talism itself employs.

There is a long- term discourse on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands/la

frontera as a space of conflict but also of negotiation, exchange, mixture,

and hybridity.19 As the border itself has become increasingly material-

ized as a fence, a wall, a line, there has of necessity been a shift to think-

ing of the border itself as a metaphysical binary. This is the point, then,

to emphasize the situated aspect of my analysis. We can certainly see

a more complex, integrative notion of borders at work in sites such as

the Canary Islands or Melilla and Ceuta (Spanish enclaves in Morocco

frequently used as passage from Africa to the EU), where a clear binary

logic is not necessarily at work. Different media forms, notably narrative

cinema, have intervened with regard to these other borders.20 The new

media art projects I address in this chapter are not about the border-

lands as a space of hybridity; rather, we will see the insistence on the

binary structure of the United States and Mexico. In this respect, they

border­HackS 37

perhaps indicate the extent to which tactical media in the United States,

as Geert Lovink has suggested, even now remain wedded to the singular

campaign, “rooted in local initiatives with their own agenda and vocabu-

lary”; unlike the media artists of former Communist countries, their ter-

rain is not that of the broad social movement or of revolution as such.21

Through an analysis of border disturbance actions initiated by the

Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)— along with a succession of works

situated on the line between artistic and political statements, particularly

projects featured in the inSite_05 festival— we will trace the contours of

a new front in the battle over immigration and mobile labor populations.

Instead of celebrating the crossing of literal and figurative borders (of

disciplinary boundaries, genre, language, gender, race, sexuality), as has

been the case within cultural criticism in recent decades, these projects

serve as a reminder of the material border’s irreducibility. No articula-

tion of a space in between, of a third term, of any spatial or geomet-

ric metaphors for hybridity, can overcome the material fact of the new

Iron Curtain. Reminiscent to some extent of the cultural nationalisms

of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, such thinking marks a moment of

anticolonial art practice: the aim is not to theorize liminality but to force

a rupture in the binaries of interiority and exteriority, here and there, na-

tive and alien, friend and enemy. The radical dichotomies integral to the

war on terror— “you’re either with us or against us”— find their counter-

part in art practices that themselves depend on the solidarity of the “we”

against the “them.” A fence has been built, binaries constructed, and

these artists intend to overturn them. Their struggle, while embedded

in a binary, rather than a hybrid, cultural logic, nevertheless suggests a

reconfigured notion of oppositionality. As we will see, both the we and

the them in these artists’ projects and practices are understood to be dif-

fuse, networked, and temporarily, rather than territorially, situated.

The imaginary of the new world order maintains territorial divisions

as metaphysical divisions, informed as it has been in the last few decades

by texts such as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the

Remaking of World Order, whose familiar thesis about civilizational

identities and differences naturalizes the U.S.–Mexico border, demar-

cating the putatively archaic and primal divisions between Anglo and

Latino.22 But we must push further to recognize that the articulation of

border­HackS38

the U.S.–Mexico border in terms of friend versus enemy is a hallmark

of our Schmittean moment. Friend and enemy are not for Carl Schmitt

private, individual, emotional, or psychological categories. It is not my

enemy but our enemy. That is, “the enemy is solely the public enemy,” and

it is the defining of the enemy that unites “us” against “them.”23 In times

of crisis, in a state of emergency, Schmitt claims, a political community

must decide who is different or threatening enough to warrant the des-

ignation “enemy”; enemies, then, are those who threaten a community’s

security and economic prosperity. Friends are those who are sufficiently

loyal and obedient to the commands of the sovereign, those who are will-

ing to risk their lives in the defense of a community. It is in these morally

absolutist terms that migrants, “illegals,” have been figured not only as

a contaminant of the social body but as a sinister threat to the political

community in the United States.

That citizens assume the responsibility of making sovereign decisions

about the normal and abnormal, trusted and untrusted, is another hall-

mark of our current moment. It is not simply that citizens have been

incorporated into the war on terror but that citizens assume the role of

proxy sovereigns. As Judith Butler notes in Precarious Life, “when the

alert goes out, every member of the population is asked to become a ‘foot

soldier’ in the war on terror.”24 And as Giorgio Agamben observes in his

analysis of the “state of exception,” “every citizen seems to be invested

with a floating and anomalous imperium.”25 With the U.S.–Mexico bor-

der written under the sign of national security, we have seen para military

and vigilante organizations such as the Minutemen claim the right to

make sovereign decisions about friend and enemy. We have also seen gu-

bernatorial plans to broadcast live surveillance footage from the Texas

border, allowing not just citizens but all Web users to report supposed

illegal crossings to an emergency hotline.26 It is in these terms that we

can revisit the DoEAT intervention: their Wanted sign directly invites

citizens to be proxy sovereigns insofar as illegals are enemies in the war

on terror. It reminds us that we are all invited to become— at times it

seems almost required to become— proxy sovereigns. In an updating of

Cold War logics, we are invited to join the search for the enemy within.

How, then, are enemies contained and managed as the U.S. national

security state evolves? In January 2006 the Department of Homeland

border­HackS 39

Security awarded a $385 million contract to the Halliburton subsidiary

Kellogg Brown and Root for the construction of new immigrant deten-

tion centers for future states of emergency: “The contract, which is ef-

fective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and

processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal

Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of im-

migrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new pro-

grams. . . . The contract may also provide migrant detention support

to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration

emergency.”27 It is not difficult to imagine parallels with the World War II

Japanese internment camps or to guess at the countries of origin of pos-

sible future detainees. Moreover, we do not need to be excessively para-

noid to recognize the great ambiguities of the phrase “new programs.” So

let us call these planned detention centers what they are— camps— and

thereby turn to Agamben’s articulation of the concept of homo sacer, that

which can be eliminated or killed but not sacrificed. The war on terror

has necessitated extensive critical commentary on homo sacer, particu-

larly in relation to camps and other contemporary states of exception,

so it is perhaps sufficient to note only that sacred life is the human body

separated from its normal political circumstances. Immigrants become

“sacred” in these terms at the moment of crossing the border, becoming

“illegal” and “enemy.”

We might probe more deeply into the relation between homo sacer

and the migrant by situating it within Butler’s commentary on violence

and derealization. For Butler the migrant (which I address here as a

representative instance of wretched, excluded, derealized life) cannot

simply be restored to, or reinserted into, the category of the human.

Rather, the migrant poses the question of the human not in the exclu-

sion it suffers from the normative condition of the human (the category,

which by its very exclusion, it helps to constitute), but by operating as

“an insurrection at the level of ontology.”28 The migrant, that is, forces

on us the question of whose lives remain real in light of those who have

already suffered the violence of derealization. Butler remarks: “If violence

is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of vio-

lence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already

negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must

border­HackS40

be negated again (and again)” (33). The migrant, then, literalizes this

spectral condition of negated life. Excluded both from the category of

the human real and from life that deserves to live, the migrant neverthe-

less lives on, returning to haunt the very site of its exclusion. “Violence,”

Butler asserts, “renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility

of its object. The derealization of the ‘Other’ means that it is neither alive

nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imag-

ines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that

justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy”

(33–34). We might further generalize this condition of spectrality to the

very institution of the border itself. Here I do not mean to erase or negate

the “real” material border with its powers of exclusion but to insist that

the border represents simultaneously a material space of violent exclu-

sion as well as a space of exclusion that is haunted by the return of that

which it has to exclude over and over again. This is to say, the border

is that which becomes spectralized by the very return of the migrant.

The border, then, functions as a space that is both real and yet made

unreal. This leads us to a strange relation between the material border

and network traffic, between flooding a material border and flooding a

server. Flooding, pulsing, “apparent inexhaustibility”— this is the mode

of the swarm, the paradigmatic mode of conflict for netwar and for the

Electronic Disturbance Theater in their strikes against the Minutemen.

Swarm the Minutemen

On May 1, 2006, the Electronic Disturbance Theater partnered with ac-

tivists in the Tijuana–San Diego area for a virtual sit- in particularly di-

rected against the Web sites of California and Arizona Minutemen orga-

nizations, Save Our State initiatives, and congressional representatives

supporting anti- immigrant legislation.29 SWARM (South West Action to

Resist the Minutemen) targeted Web sites with a distributed denial- of-

service attack, specifically with a FloodNet application that is a hallmark

of the Electronic Disturbance Theater. Emerging from the research en-

vironment at CADRE in 1998, FloodNet began as a SuperCard script

that was used playfully to upload secret messages to the error logs. 30

In the hands of the Java programmer Brett Stalbaum, in collaboration

border­HackS 41

with Carmin Karasic, Stefan Wray, and Ricardo Dominguez, himself a

former member of the Critical Art Ensemble, FloodNet evolved into a

hacktivist tactic, an applet available to anyone wishing to support the

Zapatista movement and social justice campaigns at the U.S.–Mexico

border. The SWARM the Minutemen activists provide a succinct descrip-

tion of FloodNet’s operation:

The software we are using requests files from the servers of the targeted web-

sites that are not found— files like Justice, Freedom, and the names of those

who have died crossing the border. In effect you will see the error message—

“files not found.” The sit- in will interfere with and slow down the servers of

these various groups and individuals— much like a physical sit- in slows down

the movement of people in buildings or on streets. In addition, the administra-

tors of the servers will see logs of the action where the names of those who have

died crossing, and the requested files like justice, appear repeated thousands

upon thousands of times.31

The orthographic formulation “hacktivist” suggests that a denial- of-

service attack, with its emphasis on interference and disturbance, can

be considered a legitimate means of social protest, but such a claim has

met with some resistance. For example, Oxblood Ruffin, a long- term

member of the hacking collective Cult of the Dead Cow, from which

the term “hacktivist” originated, has argued that the primary target of

hacktivist actions ought to be Internet censorship. According to Ruffin,

hacktivist networks are the “blue helmets” of the Internet and thereby

ought to work toward open code and peace rather than war.32 Since ac-

cess to information is in Cult of the Dead Cow’s terms a fundamental

human right, it follows that a distributed denial- of- service attack is an

assault on free speech and a violation of the principle of free flow. Dis-

tributed denial- of- service attacks have also been literally interpreted as

assaults: at the time of FloodNet’s initial deployment in 1998, it gener-

ated a great deal of publicity and anxiety about possible terrorist ap-

plications.33 More recently, Estonia was the target of high- profile dis-

tributed denial- of- service attacks apparently originating in Russia, an

event that now informs the many cyberwar game scenarios between

the United States and China. Thus we are seeing a massive private- and

public- sector investment in monitoring and controlling risks related to

computer use: InfoSecurity, especially data protection, is the currency

of our moment.34

border­HackS42

In his analysis of Net- based activism, Michael Dartnell draws a dis-

tinction between hacking in the form of distributed denial- of- service at-

tacks and Web activism to make the case for Web activism as the more

powerful form of insurgency.35 Since hacking aims to sabotage, Darnell

classifies it as “information terrorism,” understanding its disturbance of

networks to be destructive, threatening, and thereby pejorative. On the

other hand, he reads Web activism as productive and nonthreatening.

Rather than interfering with the operations of infrastructure, Web activ-

ism aims to transform the social conditions in which that infrastructure

is situated. In his three case studies of social movements in Ireland, Af-

ghanistan, and Peru, Dartnell suggests that communication— for exam-

ple, raising public awareness of gender politics of the Taliban regime— is

the prima facie form of “insurgency.” His contribution to the discourse

on Net- based activism notably shifts the focus from the state to engage

nonstate actors and a nonterritorial politics; however, it is precariously

based on an evaluative distinction between “good” and “bad” insurgen-

cies. Moreover, it is not ultimately clear how visual and verbal images

might not disturb or terrorize, how a public relations campaign might

not itself be a form of sabotage.

Coco Fusco describes Electronic Disturbance Theater’s FloodNet op-

erations as “nonmimetic theater,” with only “abstract representations

of the ‘hits’ and textual descriptions of the purpose and/or motive for

the actions,” and indeed that is an apt description of the visual record

of the performances.36 Though there is an element of play at work in a

FloodNet virtual sit- in, and certainly there is no small amount of de-

light in reading the outbursts of saveourstate.org forum members when

their server temporarily goes down, EDT is adamant: “This is a Protest.

FloodNet is not a game.”37 It is indeed not a game but in fact the pri-

mary weapon in EDT’s arsenal, over time targeting various institutions

and symbols of Mexican neoliberalism, NAFTA, CAFTA, the School for

the Americas, the U.S. Defense Department, Samuel Huntington, Rep-

resentative Sensenbrenner, and others. 38 Though these targets appear

focused, SWARM’s overall concern is not simply a set of antagonists but

a “systemic logic,” which “ ‘others’ migrant people and people of color

in general” and willfully erases the complex history of migration to the

United States in order to posit a rightfully native population.39

border­HackS 43

How is it that one battles a “systemic logic” rather than a clearly iden-

tifiable opponent, one that can be seen and therefore destroyed?40 What

is the critical rationale for FloodNet as a mode of protest? To understand

the rationale, we must understand the swarm as it has been theorized by

Rand Corporation researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in their

work on the effects of information technologies on conflict. Put simply,

swarming is a mode of conflict in what has been called, variously, “cyber-

war,” “infowar,” and “netwar.”41 Such conflict has never been limited to

traditional military warfare, nor does it necessarily need to be online;

in fact, as Arquilla and Ronfeldt explain in Networks and Netwars, “we

had in mind actors as diverse as transnational terrorists, criminals, and

even radical activists” (2). Swarming, then, can be high- , low- , or no-

tech (11). Regardless, it is a mode of attack, both a military tactic and a

practice of political resistance: “Swarming is a seemingly amorphous,

but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all

directions at a particular point or points” (12). And in the context of their

analysis of the Zapatista movement, they write: “Swarming occurs when

the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces

converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sus­

tainable pulsing— swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and

stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to

recombine for a new pulse.”42 We can contrast the swarm with the wave-

like structure of the phalanx: the swarm is the dispersion of force rather

than its massification or concentration. It is also the paradigmatic figure

for the CGI battle scene (The Matrix Reloaded, the Crazy 88s scene in Kill

Bill), and as such its choreography— marked by convergence, “sustainable

pulsing,” even “apparent inexhaustibility”— has been firmly ensconced in

our cultural imaginary. That it would similarly be lodged in our political

imaginary is indicated by the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s proposal

for the development of “non- violent Electronic Pulse Systems (EPS).”43

Themselves the kind of “radical activists” whose tactics Arquilla and

Ronfeldt seek to describe, EDT in turn has recourse to the Rand papers

on swarming to articulate their project of digital Zapatismo.

Dominguez and his fellow tacticians work with some of the core prin-

ciples of Critical Art Ensemble: power is no longer centralized but has

become networked and nomadic; the site of resistance has in turn shifted

border­HackS44

from the street to the network; the object of electronic civil disobedience

(ECD) is disturbance and obstruction; and disturbance is necessarily

temporary.44 In their first book, The Electronic Disturbance, Critical Art

Ensemble (with Dominguez on board) announces that power “has shed

as many of its sedentary attachments as possible”; it is fluid, decentral-

ized, capable of resituating itself.45 For Critical Art Ensemble, then, revo-

lution is no longer a matter of spatialized expression; there is no longer a

Winter Palace to storm. That is, “the architectural monuments of power

are hollow and empty, and function now only as bunkers for the complicit

and those who acquiesce. . . . These places can be occupied, but to do so

will not disrupt the nomadic flow” (23). The architectural monuments

are defunct, and so, too, are the streets, which are “dead capital”; in fact,

“the streets in particular and public spaces in general are in ruins.”46 Or,

as Hardt and Negri will put it later in Multitude, “basic traditional mod-

els of political activism, class struggle and revolutionary organization

have become outmoded and useless.”47 Resistance, then, must withdraw

to the networks, for “to fight a decentralized power requires the use of a

decentralized means.”48 Power has become nomadic and, as such, “has

created its own nemesis— its own image . . . in the barbarian hordes—

the true nomads of cyberspace.”49 In his 1998 paper on the futures of

electronic civil disobedience, Electronic Disturbance Theater member

Stefan Wray predicts that the site of resistance will shift as “more and

more these acts will take place in electronic or digital form.”50 He specu-

lates that the wars of the future, our present, “will be protested by the

clogging or actual rupture of fiber optic cables and ISDN lines— acting

upon the electronic and communications infrastructure.” Such transgres-

sive tactics shift the Internet “from the public sphere model and casts

it more as conf licted territory bordering on a war zone.”51 Wray takes

care to stress that street protests will by no means disappear; rather,

“we are likely to see a proliferation of hybridized actions that involve a

multiplicity of tactics, combining actions on the street and actions in

cyberspace.” Electronic civil disobedience, then, will gradually develop

as a “component” or “complement” to more established forms of civil and

political protest. It may be the case that guerrilla action is limited, but,

as Critical Art Ensemble notes, the “old school” of street protest “has

plenty of currency in local affairs where problem institutions are present

and concrete.”52 On this point, we would certainly need to acknowledge

border­HackS 45

both the street protests against proposed anti- immigration legislation

in spring 2006, when the Los Angeles Times Web headline announced,

“Wave of Dissent Grips U.S. Cities” (May 1), and the school walkouts co-

ordinated by social networking tools and Web- to- SMS broadcasting.

The use of electronic civil disobedience to thwart the flows of infor-

mation, to obstruct, block, and otherwise disturb has been extensively

documented, but what bears reiterating here is the notion, again articu-

lated by Critical Art Ensemble, that “blocking information access is the

best means to disrupt any institution, whether it is military, corporate, or

governmental.”53 Again we see an adumbration and an echo of Arquilla

and Ronfeldt’s thinking about electronic activism (they seem in some

sense to produce each other): “It means disrupting if not destroying the

information and communications systems, broadly defined to include

even military culture, on which an adversary relies in order to ‘know’

itself.”54 The Rand authors leave open the possibility of outright destruc-

tion, but CAE and EDT will insist this is not their aim.55 Rather, the ob-

jective of a disruptive action or performance is the temporary reversal,

not the cessation, of the flows of power.56 FloodNet in particular is also,

as Graham Meikle notes, “primarily a media event.”57 On this point, too,

we might remember that the threat of FloodNet applications is perhaps

more symbolic than actual, however dangerous it may seem to disrupt

server traffic for a few hours.58 Dominguez acknowledges the difference

between the symbolic and the real: “Electronic civil disobedience has a

certain symbolic efficacy against power. With the Mexican government,

no matter what you do to their website, you’re not going to disturb their

tanks, their missiles. No matter how much you disturb Nike’s website,

you’re not going to disturb their stores, because they have real exchange

power on the ground.”59 (We might certainly extend the point to include

the Minutemen and NAFTA Web sites.) To put the inevitable question

bluntly: what, then, is the point? The answer offered by Dominguez, EDT,

and other tactical media practitioners is again informed by CAE, but to

understand fully the investment in temporary provocations and distur-

bances, we need to return to Foucault, for whom “there is no single locus

of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law

of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of

them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improba-

ble; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or

border­HackS46

violent.”60 After Foucault, then, we have CAE (“resistance can be viewed

as a matter of degree; a total system crash is not the only option, nor may

it even be a viable one”) and Dominguez himself: “There is only perma-

nent cultural resistance; there is no endgame.”61

In what are we investing, then, if not a revolution or an endgame?

In sum it is the “negation of negation”: “The hope is to try to maintain

the open fields that already exist, and perhaps expand this territory and

elongate its temporality, rather than insist that we can change the whole

structure with some kind of utopian ideal.”62 In David Garcia and Geert

Lovink’s manifesto “The ABC of Tactical Media,” we see a similar focus

on an elongated temporality of the present, the provisional, the “here

and now.”63 “Tactical Media are never perfect,” never finished, Garcia

and Lovink tell us. Rather, tactical media are “always in becoming, per-

formative and pragmatic, involved in a continual process of question-

ing the premises of the channels they work with.”64 In all we can see

the recognition that “revolution” as such does not need to be a singular

temporal or spatial event, that it does not need to be a moment of spec-

tacle. Instead, we can think, as does Dominguez, in terms of “symbolic

efficacy.” A temporary provocation, however momentary, can change the

signifying field in which it occurs, though its material effects cannot be

determined in advance. In this respect, the provocation has no neces-

sary teleology; its outcomes are unpredictable and unforeseeable. Why

else should the Amsterdam tactical media festivals be organized under

the rubric “Next Five Minutes”? This is not to say that utopian vision

is somehow bounded or curtailed but to observe that a practitioner of

tactical media acts for the here and now with a fragmentary and hope-

ful vision of an ideal future, but one that may very well not, as Vilém

Flusser reminds us, be “carried to completion.”65 Dominguez speaks to

the shifting quality of his vision of utopia, which is not fixed on a future

horizon but ever in flux: “A difficult kind of hope because it’s not bound

to a specific image of utopia. . . . [but] must be built without a prerecog-

nition of what the endpoint will look like.”66 Critical Art Ensemble, too,

writes of the need to gamble on a tactical event: “All that is required is

the ability to live with uncertainty, and the willingness to act despite the

potential for unforeseen negative consequences.”67 In other words, just

DoEAT.

border­HackS 47

Crosser/La Migra

Much like the DoEAT performance with the San Diego highway Caution

signs, Trebor Scholz and Carol Flax’s hypermedia project Tuesday After­

noon (2001) speaks to the discontinuities in the movements of money

and goods in our neoliberal moment. Superimposed on a low- contrast

map of the U.S.–Mexico border are the following opening lines: “The

right to navigate one’s own geography is not shared by the migrant or

the refugee. The borders or frontiers, which capital crosses with ease,

are insurmountable for the poor or the dispossessed.” The project de-

scription on Rhizome puts it succinctly: “In the process of globalization,

inter national borders become increasingly easy to cross for capital. Cor-

porations reach super- mobility, but borders are militarized against ‘un-

desirable’ populations.”68 From the outset, then, Tuesday Afternoon ar-

ticulates one of the central demands not only of migrants, refugees, and

asylum seekers but of all people: the right of free movement, the “right

to navigate one’s own geography.” The call for freedom of movement has

resounded from numerous activist organizations in Europe and North

America. For example, the No Border Network cohered in late 1999 to

Trebor Scholz and Carol Flax, Tuesday Afternoon, 2001.

border­HackS48

document and coordinate movements driven by the twin principles of

free movement and settledness, “for the freedom for all to stay in the

place which they have chosen.”69 The call has also resounded from theo-

rists embedded in antiglobalization movements and practices: most

notably, Hardt and Negri have asserted the right to free movement as

“the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship.”70 It is in these

terms, too, that we can understand the importance of the audio in Tues­

day Afternoon. From the map we move into the primary frame of the

piece; on the left is a small QuickTime video shot from the perspective of

someone walking along an unpaved desert road that curves toward the

distant horizon. The primary audio track of the video, which is on a con-

tinual replay loop, is the sound of someone walking, of purposeful and

solitary movement. No leisurely stroll through a pastoral landscape, this

movement is insistent, its relentlessness suggesting a focused intensity.

Like the project’s title, it captures the ordinariness, the noneventness, of

migrancy. The audio does not represent an authentic “migrant experi-

ence,” but it does in some sense approximate it. It evokes a typological,

categorical experience similarly evoked but then negated by the textual

narratives.

A set of interlocking short stories of border crossings unfolds in basic

hypertextual form: one follows a young couple traveling by bus for a fam-

ily visit in Europe; somewhere in the Balkans, the young woman with

the “outlandish looking” green passport imprinted in Cyrillic letters is

stopped by border control and denied entry. Her travel visas are useless,

she is told; Britain has not signed the Schengen Agreement. The first-

person narrator of another, set in the border town of Nogales, Arizona,

considers his compulsory army service on the East German border and

wonders why someone would voluntarily serve as a border guard “on this

so very different border.” Another outlines a marriage of convenience

that unravels and is detected and nullified by the UK Home Office, which

gives the woman thirty days to leave the country. A third poetically

evokes the condition of an asylum seeker: “she does not want to leave”;

“this safe place”; “why would she go back”; “and maybe be tortured.” This

thread, which is not geographically or culturally specific, becomes even

more sinister with the suggestion that the woman’s movements are being

tracked: “I recognized a person / in the back of the van.” The “two broth-

border­HackS 49

ers” narrative indirectly recounts the death by dehydration of two broth-

ers twenty miles outside of Tucson, Arizona. In its articulation not only

of movement but also of the cessation of movement, Tuesday Afternoon

is aligned with artist- activist projects such as SWARM, which takes

pains to document northward migratory routes as well as the estimated

sites of death during failed crossings.71 The background landscape for

Tuesday Afternoon is not experienced as the pastoral; rather, it is figured

as a “site of discrimination and even death.”72

These stories are specific and yet also in some sense generalized. They

all contain geographic and sociocultural markers, and yet a certain gen-

erality is preserved within them. To understand the full significance of

this, we need to turn to the project description: “Tuesday Afternoon, made

to be experienced online, is an easily accessible hypermedia project that

contrasts issues of individually experienced border crossings. . . . Using

sound, text and video, the game- like structure of Tuesday Afternoon

makes each visitor’s interaction with the piece unique.” The assertion of

the “unique” aspect of each visit dates the project somewhat, reminding

us of a moment in which the discourse on interactivity made claims for

the radically individual aspect of each textual encounter and a reading

experience that was more singular than shared. Today this insistence on

singularity also points us in a different direction. It is not that the piece

suggests that the migrant experience is somehow substitutable— in fact,

the project description insists the opposite by explaining that it “con-

trasts issues of individually experienced border crossings.” The apparent

typological aspect of the text— “two brothers” or “she married”— instead

speaks to the fundamental nonreproducibility of the migrant experi-

ence. Scholz and Flax’s decision to forgo literal representation and ren-

der the migrant and refugees’ stories only in the third person suggests a

certain cognizance of the critical problems of “speaking for.”73 If border

crossings are understood to be “individually experienced,” then, absent

a direct testimony, a witnessing of one’s own experience, one can only

have recourse to the categorical. (It is in these terms that we will come

to understand the game spaces as well.) Highlighting one final aspect of

the project will lead us to a coterminous work set against a seemingly

pastoral landscape and engaging issues of immigration and borders.

Scholz and Flax emphasize the “easily accessible” aspect of their online

border­HackS50

project, which introduces an inverse relation between the accessibility of

the project and the migrant’s lack of mobility, between open systems and

closed systems, between free movement and restricted movement. This

is the critical space of Heath Bunting and Rachel Baker’s BorderXing

Guide (2001).

BorderXing Guide set out to perform and document a set of walks

that cross national boundaries within the European Union, often by the

most difficult means possible.74 Responding to the restrictions on move-

ment of non- EU citizens, that is, less “trusted travelers,” the project was

staged at a moment of transition for the European borders, when the

nation- state opened and the EU borders simultaneously closed, the mo-

ment when the line between interior and exterior was being resituated.

The artists traversed nearly two- dozen international borders without

papers and, in doing so, pointed to the ease of travel afforded to EU

citizens. The project, however, might initially seem quite removed from

the border crossings of asylum seekers, refugees, or sans papiers. But its

nomadic pastoral aesthetic is interrupted by the documentary photo-

graphs of razor- wire fences and other material demarcations of borders.

Particularly in the crossing of borders into the former Eastern Europe,

Bunting and Baker highlighted the remnants of the security state in

photographs of fences and crossing- guard stations. In keeping with

Bunting’s ongoing investment in maps and networks that are alternative

and oppositional to the global network economy, BorderXing Guide put

the pedestrian into dialogue with the asylum seeker and walking into

dialogue with vagrancy. The project also resulted from Bunting’s “drive

to reduce my possessions to almost nothing and to replace them with

techniques.”75 There is an aspect of the pilgrimage, then, in the shedding

of possessions and the commencement of a long and arduous journey.

The online slide show of the journey might also confirm this were it not

for the “guide” component of the project, which provides maps and sug-

gested routes for illicit border crossings. Bunting’s recent collaborative

work, Status Project (with Kayle Brandon, 2004), contains in this vein,

offering as it does to “make visible . . . both street and institutional sys-

tems” and “to facilitate easy movement within them.”76 A review in the

New York Times speaks to the tension between this project and the na-

tional security state: “In its final form, their project may be viewed as

border­HackS 51

the Homeland Security Department’s worst nightmare: a road map en-

abling all sorts of undesirables to penetrate a nation’s borders, banking

systems, supermarket loyalty clubs.”77 But the more salient component

of BorderXing Guide for my discussion here is the delineation of private

and public use. Bunting notes that the work is “biased against private

consumption,” a literal statement about the restriction of site access to

authorized clients. To gain access, viewers either have to travel to a pub-

lic site with a static IP address— authorized clients include galleries such

as the Tate and all servers in “developing” countries— or to make their

own private terminal public. We might then see a clear parallel between

trusted users and trusted travelers, with BorderXing Guide speaking to

the relation between online access and the freedom of movement.

Judi Werthein’s shoes— Brinco (Jump)— provide us with an entryway

into the crossroads between migrancy and the global corporatization of

goods and labor.78 Designed for the inSite_05 show and manufactured

in China, the shoes were equipped with the necessary tools for crossing

borders on foot, including a compass and a flashlight for night crossings.

A small pocket on the tongue of the shoe holds either money or pain-

killers, and the removable insole is printed with a map of documented

safe crossing points on the Tijuana–San Diego route. The movement of

the migrants who wore them— a set number of pairs were distributed

along the border as part of Werthein’s intervention/show/project— is

marked at three points along the shoe. On the heel is an image of Santo

Toribio Romo, the Mexican patron saint of migrants, their guide and

protector. An Aztec eagle is embroidered on the side, and the eagle of the

U.S. quarter appears on the toe, indicating or perhaps even propelling

the migrant’s movement toward the United States. The artist designed

one thousand pairs for manufacture in China; after she distributed some

along the U.S.–Mexico border, the remainder were sold in a high- end bou-

tique in San Diego. The contrast between the Chinese production costs

($17) and the resale costs in the boutique ($215) not only brings issues of

outsourcing and wage inequities to the fore but also points to the inevi-

table commodification of the experience of the other.

At this stage, the thematic significance of the shoe, of walking, of the

visual and auditory representation of movement, should be clear, its con-

nection to the demand for the freedom to control one’s own movement

border­HackS52

apparent. The canonical text on this issue of freedom of movement is

Hardt and Negri’s Empire. In their schema, Empire depends on a mi-

grant labor force; it cannot then shut down the flows of autonomous

movement without destabilizing itself. It is a bit of an understatement to

say that Hardt and Negri have a more optimistic than pessimistic view

of nomadism, of the “specter of migration” and the “irrepressible desire

for free movement.” On the issue of nomadism as a form of class strug-

gle, they are unequivocal: “Mobility and mass worker nomadism always

express a refusal and a search for liberation: the resistance against the

horrible conditions of exploitation and the search for freedom and new

conditions of life.”79 We might contrast their vision of the potentialities

of free movement with the intensification of the biometric regulation of

movement under the US- VISIT and related programs, with the division

of the population into trusted and untrusted travelers. But we should

not think that the calls for free movement are limited to one group or

another. That the demand for freedom of movement is part of a more

fundamental claim for the droit de cité (rights to full citizenship) is ex-

plained by Balibar in his extended review of an essay by the Italian soci-

ologists Alessandro Dal Lago and Sandro Mezzadra:

I do not believe that the political “demands” of migrants (be they “refugees” or

“workers,” two not necessarily separate categories)— extremely powerful de-

mands that are ever rejected but never obliterated and which are fundamental

if we are to have democratic change— constitute a demand that mobility as

such, “deterritorialized” mobility, be recognized. I believe that the relation of

these demands to the construction of modern Europe is solely a relation to the

“mechanisms of control” of capitalist globalization. Surely freedom of move-

ment is a basic claim that must be incorporated within the citizenship of all

people (and not only for representatives of the “powerful nations,” for whom

this is largely a given).80

The demand for freedom of movement, as Balibar notes, is not a de-

mand for movement as such; in fact, the freedom not to move might

also be construed as expressive of a certain dignity. The withholding of

movement is certainly a familiar practice of civil disobedience, wherein

“I would prefer not to move” is a mode of refusal by withdrawal rather

than confrontation.81 Like Bartleby’s refusal, it is passive and danger-

ous, suggesting a certain decorum while also announcing that one is

border­HackS 53

subject to power. In the ceding of power, what is left is the power to with-

hold. What we might extrapolate from Balibar’s reading, then, is that

the droit de cité includes the freedom of movement for all, not simply for

the “migrant” of the global South, and it also includes residential rights,

the freedom not to move, to remain settled.82 This is to say that beyond

Balibar’s analysis, we must also recognize the capitalist forces that com-

pel movement and be wary of the equation of freedom with the ability to

become nomadic. Mobility per se by no means endows the subject with

an unconditional freedom. In fact, it is precisely the migrant’s separa-

tion from the nation- state as the guarantor of human rights that places

her at risk.

Flusser similarly speaks to the unmitigated celebration of free move-

ment or nomadism as he engages the question “Is a person free simply

because he is able to flee?”83 With Flusser’s own story of forced exile from

Prague to Brazil at the start of the Nazi occupation in mind, we might

guess, correctly, that the answer would be in the negative: “When I leave

the first contingence so that I may enter another one at the same level,

I am a refugee. I have become neither outraged nor engaged but have al-

lowed myself to drift. There is no dignity in such movement. However, if

I leave the first contingence and enter into a state of irony, and then enter

the second contingence out of this irony, then I am both outraged and

engaged, and my decision has dignity” (22–23). Flusser has recourse to

the Greek nomad in order further to counter the notion that “the strange

dizziness of liberation and freedom” might be located in all movement.

To read nomads, wanderers, as “outside the law,” he explains, requires

the perspective of one who is settled within, and afforded rights by, a

political community (47).84 Perhaps the most resounding critique of the

discourse on nomadism, however, comes from Slavoj Žižek, who charges

Deleuze and Guattari with having produced the “ideology of the newly

emerging ruling class.”85

It is precisely the discourse on nomadism that informs Zygmunt

Bauman’s “liquid modernity” thesis, which holds that “we are witnessing

the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settle-

ment. . . . It is now the smaller, the lighter, the more portable that signifies

improvement and ‘progress.’ Traveling light, rather than holding tightly

to things deemed attractive for their reliability and solidity— that is, for

border­HackS54

their heavy weight, substantiality and unyielding power of resistance— is

now the asset of power.”86 Liquidity, in Bauman’s analysis, refers to social

disintegration as both the precondition and the consequence of the new

logic of power. “It is the mind- boggling speed of circulation, of recycling,

ageing, dumping, and replacement which brings profit today” (14). This

view of the opening up of nomadic traffic and the elimination of check

or stoppage points comes at the end of the wired 1990s and extends the

Kevin Kelly line of thinking to the notion that “heavy, Fordist- style capi-

talism” is over and a new epoch of “software capitalism” has begun (63,

116). But the liquid modernity thesis is also very much in the spirit of

Hardt and Negri’s synopsis of Empire’s capitalist logic of power, with

its assertion that the “hardware era, the epoch of weight and ever more

cumbersome machines,” and “heavy modernity,” “the era of territorial

conquest” is coming to a close (113–14). Liquidity suggests a temporal

rather than spatial logic of power, a shift away from the management of

material things to the management of mobility and speed. Antiliquidity,

then, is the space of Electronic Disturbance Theater’s intervention, as

Dominguez explains: “The goal of EDT’s disturbance is to block Virtual

Capitalism’s race toward weightlessness and the social consequences a

totalized immaterial ethics creates.”87 Their object is not necessarily to

emphasize the material basis of capitalism, as does Allan Sekula in his

poignant photographs highlighting the sheer mass and weight of cargo

shipping containers, but to disrupt the circulation and f low of virtual

capitalism.88 In fact, I will have occasion to wonder in subsequent chap-

ters if the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunica-

tions (SWIFT), the computer network for global funds transfer mes-

sages, is not the logical next target for an EDT disturbance action.

The inSite_05 online exhibit, Tijuana Calling/Llamando Tijuana,

will introduce further themes and questions.89 The five artist teams

selected were asked to construct a project that was strictly networked,

though aspects of a physical installation made their way into many of the

projects in spite of this mandate. Ricardo Dominguez and Coco Fusco’s

Turista Fronterizo is, as its title suggests, an exercise in border tourism

presented in the form of a Monopoly- like game. Players choose one of four

characters, all border crossers, and proceed on “a virtual journey through

the San Diego–Tijuana borderlands,” or, simply, around the board.90 As

border­HackS 55

Gringa Activista, El Gringo Poderoso, El Junior, or La Todológa, players

encounter various obstacles and windfalls according to type, adding to or

depleting the initial monetary stake as the case may be. So, for example,

as the binational businessman, you bribe government officials to secure

permits for refineries, buy drugs, pay lobbyists, and rebut negative press

about your company’s use of toxins and pollutants. If you play in Spanish

as El Junior (characterized as huevón, politely translated as “lazy”), you

often end up at a strip club in Tijuana, under suspicion by the DEA, or

back in the Detention Center. Clichéd this may seem, and indeed that is

the point for a game that works with types to destabilize types. That is,

the general, categorical aspect of the gameplay alludes to the reduction

of real material lives to one- dimensional, prescripted characters. The

project does not aim to grant a voice to the migrant or the citizen; rather,

Ricardo Dominguez and Coco Fusco, Turista Fronterizo, 2005.

border­HackS56

the project suggests that one cannot speak from within or outside the

scripted gameplay. As with a role- playing game, players are addressed in

the second person, allowing for a kind of pedagogical experience— what

happens if you are caught with cocaine at the border?— limited by the

absence of source or reference material; that is, players wanting concrete

information about cocaine traffic, for example, must conduct their own

research. Dominguez and Fusco also use the form of the game to thema-

tize the migrant’s perpetual search for work. This is most obvious in the

case of La Todológa, a general worker whose profession is whatever she

finds, the script for whom highlights the goal- oriented aspect of labor

in the moment of neoliberal globalization. In this character’s script, it is

only the goal— money— that matters, rather than labor itself. As many

have noted, it is this reduction of labor to an end that can partially ex-

plain why workers’ rights claims no longer maintain the same force as

they did under industrial capitalism; labor, that is, is no longer valued

as an integral, socially significant activity. Rather, the job must be com-

pleted and the work economically compensated, in this case in order for

the die to be cast for the player’s next turn. Though inSite had wanted

projects that were exclusively online, Dominguez also built a 1970s style

Pac Man game box for the project and installed it at the Zapatista head-

quarters in Tijuana. The new computer that housed the game was also

placed there to build up the local media lab, thus coordinating not only

the material and “virtual” aspects of Turista Fronterizo but also Turista

Fronterizo and digital Zapatismo. Moreover, the physical placement of

the computer game at EZLN headquarters forecloses the presentation of

Mexico as a stable object of border tourism.91

Turista Fronterizo is one of many “games with an agenda,” and there

are others directly concerned with the U.S.–Mexico border, two of which

are Rafael Fajardo’s Crosser and La Migra.92 Modeling the games on

the 8- bit aesthetics of Frogger and Space Invaders, respectively, Fajardo

works with basic game mechanics to stage the scene of border crossing

as one of collision detection. Thus the crosser must avoid both air and

land border patrol, highway traffic, and dead bodies and other obstacles

in the river; and la migra uses a car to block the descending bodies (an

incomplete “hit” results in death). While one might think this seems a bit

macabre, Fajardo self- consciously employs the garish colors and avatars

border­HackS 57

particular to many games so as to preserve a game’s basic antagonistic

structure. Within these game spaces, border crossing is staged in unadul-

terated binary terms: U.S.–Mexico, crosser–la migra, good- evil. This is

migrancy and territorial sovereignty starkly polarized— how else are we

to understand the implications of rendering border crossing as a matter

of obstacle avoidance? How, further, are we to understand that success-

ful border crossers in La Migra— those not swatted back à la Pong— fall

into a detention center for deportees? We might further address the use

of a game, as Fajardo notes, to “create a subtle multi- level critique” by

considering his statement on the matter: “I’ve come to understand that

the games, any games that attempt to deal with the real, will be incom-

plete. The map is not the territory, the stakes are not life and death, and

a player can walk away when the thrill is gone.”93

The games will be necessarily incomplete, so as a complement to the

caricatured figures they present— migrants flee, and la migra hunts—

we can consider instances of documentary self- representation produced

within the Border Film Project (2005).94 Project leaders distributed be-

tween four hundred and five hundred disposable cameras to both mi-

grants and the Minutemen, asking them to take the photographs of their

choosing and to return the cameras in a SASE (migrants had the incen-

tive of an anonymous Wal- Mart gift card to prompt their return of the

cameras once they reached the United States). For the most part, it is

striking to see the extent that self- representation occurs within given

narratives of subject formation: in the selected photographs, Minutemen

sit and watch; migrants walk or show injurious effects of movement (one

memorable shot is of horribly blistered feet). There are the requisite lone

ranger shots of the Minutemen framed against the sky and the tempo-

rary camps established by migrants on their journeys. With the Border

Film Project in mind, we can return to Fajardo’s statement on the use of

a game space as cultural critique: “Rather, I have come to understand

Crosser and La Migra as poems, where the absences and silences are

as important as that which is stated.”95 Invoking Baudrillard on the

simulacrum, Fajardo reminds us that the “map is not the territory,” that

we should clearly not conflate the border games with the “real” border.

We should attend to, play, Crosser and La Migra as games— this much

is indicated by the design— but as poems they are intended to have a

border­HackS58

memorializing capacity as well. What they cannot capture or represent

are the “absences and silences” that demarcate the difference between a

game and a game of life and death.

Having examined new media art’s engagement with territorial bor-

ders, I want to move by way of a conclusion to an account of the complex

entanglements of the territorial and the biometric brought to the fore

by Anne- Marie Schleiner and Luis Hernandez’s Corridos, a 3- D open-

source, cross- platform game also commissioned for the Tijuana Calling

exhibit (2005). Taking its title from the corrido, a mestiza narrative bal-

lad traceable to the early modern Spanish ballad form of the romance,

Corridos maintains a parallel investment in fostering cultures of resis-

tance. Since corridos functioned as a paradigmatic mode of itinerant

Rafael Fajardo, Crosser.

border­HackS 59

storytelling, these ballads played a significant role during the Mexican

Revolution, their dispersal epitomizing the very decentralized modes of

dissent that now inform Electronic Disturbance Theater. As Américo

Paredes has shown, corridos are particular to the populations around the

U.S.–Mexico border, where the “slow, dogged struggle against economic

enslavement and the loss of their own identity was the most important

factor in the development of a distinct local balladry.”96 In the develop-

ment of a resistant local balladry in the border regions geographically

separated from Mexico’s centers of power, we can see a clear antecedent

to digital Zapatismo and other tactical movements in the present.

Rafael Fajardo, La Migra, 2003.

border­HackS60

The corrido has also traditionally been sung by migrants on the jour-

ney north, their narrative subjects outlaws and related legends. Corridos

the project takes its thematic cue from narco- corridos, contemporary

ballads that are often reverential toward drug traders. The designers

outline the game scenario with respect to its title:

Corrido: Oral form of communication, deeply rooted in mexican culture, per-

fected during the revolution (1910), when the media was co- opted by the gov-

ernment, as an opensource, peer to peer efficient way of disseminating news

from afar, mainly great battles and heroic gestures. In recent decades, this

form has been retaken to sing about famous narcotraffickers and big traf-

ficking operations. Narco- corrido songs tell the sometimes sad, cynical and

romanticed adventures of narco traffikers who take great risks to deliver

drugs across the mexican/us frontera, over a polka or waltz beat in the back-

ground. . . . Corridos are usually commissioned to norteño musicians by the

traffikers themselves, who like to hear songs about their exploits, beginning at

500 USD and going up.97

The game Corridos puts the player in the position of a drug smug-

gler along the Tijuana–San Ysidro border. As with the ballad, the game

situates the outlaw or criminal in an idealized subject position but also

Anne­Marie Schleiner and Luis Hernandez, Corridos, 2005.

border­HackS 61

reminds us of the double figuring of people and drugs as undesirable.

Peter Andreas notes that “the politics of opening the border to legal eco-

nomic flows is closely connected to the politics of making it appear more

closed to illegal flows.”98 Indeed, both people and drug are lumped to-

gether under the rubric of “illegal traffic.” The language of drugs in the

game also derives from the folklore of the ballad, wherein animals stand

in for substances (the three animals, goat, rooster, and parrot, refer to

heroin, marijuana, and cocaine, respectively). Invoking the complex and

imbricated histories of the ballad and of drug trafficking, Corridos links

both within the context of an open- source environment that allows for

modification, somewhat in the way that ballad lyrics allow for musical

variation.

More important for our purposes is the objective of the game, which is

to find the secret tunnels— narco- tunnels— leading from Tijuana to San

Ysidro and use them to run drugs and weapons between the two coun-

tries. Modeled on two area neighborhoods, or aspects of two area neigh-

borhoods, Corridos has recourse to the material real in its presentation of

secret tunnels that circumvent border controls, while nonetheless insist-

ing that it is “just a game.” As the designers note: “Corridos is basically a

computer game about driving and listening to music.” The putative dis-

crepancy between a game and the migrant, material world collapsed in

the Denver airport in November 2005. En route to visit his wife and col-

laborator, Anne- Marie Schleiner, Hernandez was detained by Homeland

Security agents after a luggage search turned up copies of both the game

and the inSite_05 brochure, which together rendered him an untrusted

subject. Hernandez describes the incident in detail in a post to the inSite

group:

In a luggage check at the Denver International Airport, the TSA/immigration

found both a “Tijuana Calling” brochure and a copy of the game that Anne-

Marie and me produced for inSite. They searched the inSite website and all of

its links and loaded the game and made me play it for them, they found that

the game as most of the projects were posing a threat to the U.S. national se-

curity and that they were “Anti- American,” in speaking about illegal crossings

and traffic, in their own words. One officer even told me to watch out who we

were working for. I explained that the game as well as the other pieces of art

had been commissioned by an art institution whose objective is to gain deeper

cross understanding about life in the Mex–U.S. border, for both the peoples of

border­HackS62

Mexico and the U.S. They said they didn’t believe it and discredited the fes-

tival, evidently ignoring what art is. When I told them that the organisation

was run by U.S. citizens, they replied that not all U.S. citizens are prone to like

the government and its policies and that actually a lot of them were working

against it.99

Were this to end in a spectacular confrontation and escape, it might

even be the nonlyric text for a contemporary corrido, perhaps one might

even call it a ludo­ corrido. It is in fact both a story of a “great battle”

and a story of risk but crucially lacks a romanticized ending. To wit:

after a lengthy interrogation about Hernandez’s knowledge of secret

tunnels and terrorist activities in the border regions, he was deported

back to Mexico, barred from reentering the United States for a period of

five years.

From the speculation that the launch of the FloodNet applet in 1998

was a terrorist act to the charge that a computer game constitutes “a

threat to the U.S. national security,” we have begun outlining the evolv-

ing relations between socially engaged new media art and the secu-

rity apparatus, more broadly between contemporary art practices and

charges of terrorism.100 Another installment must surely address the

ongoing legal case of Steve Kurtz, the Critical Art Ensemble member

investigated on suspicion of bioterrorism and eventually charged by a

federal grand jury in June 2005 with mail and wire fraud.101 In their

commentary on the Kurtz case, Rebecca Schneider and Jon McKenzie

pose an important question: “Is CAE’s general move away from rhetoric

toward tactile participation pointedly what provoked the FBI to suspect

terrorism?”102 We might well pose much the same question here: what

is it about the game (“tactile participation”) as opposed to the brochure

(“rhetoric”) that brought Hernandez under suspicion? In the quotidian

exercise of risk profiling and threat assessment, it is Corridos the game

that renders Hernandez a dangerous, untrusted subject.103 The brochure

and festival may be written under the sign of sedition, but the game is

written under the sign of risk. I will hazard a generalization and say

that our shared cinematic imaginary alone, much less the coverage of

the Iraq war, ought to have made us all well versed in the use of games

and simulations as training mechanisms for military activities. How else

are we to understand the TSA officials’ mandate that Hernandez play

border­HackS 63

the game in their presence? In this context, the game becomes the illegal

substance, the undesirable, that which cannot cross the border, and the

TSA mandate becomes part of a military operation. The newly amplified

practices of state securitization and the issue of material border cross-

ings come together in this complex instance of risk assessment.104

InSite festival projects such as Turista Fronterizo might initially raise

the question of a discrepancy between the migrant, material world and

the computer game, but Hernandez’s detention is a clear moment of con-

junction between them. The distinction between Hernandez the artist

and the first- person perspective of Corridos collapsed, and Hernandez

in a sense became embedded in his own game, thrust into the world that

his project portrays. The temporal, epistemological, spatial, and socio-

cultural gap between the “illegal” and the artist- activist closed, the latter

thrown into the world of the former. The artist himself becomes enclosed

within restricted borders, indicating that the radical dichotomy between

the game and the real is ultimately not sustainable. It is also important

to take account of another aspect of risk embedded in the game. One of

the risks run by hacktivist art projects is that they go unacknowledged,

that their provocations are either unseen or dismissed as mere game

playing. At the very moment that Hernandez is forced to play the game

in the presence of TSA officials, the game succeeds in unfolding the very

risk it was predicated on. It succeeds, that is, in displaying the activist

political potential coded within it. This, after all, is the audience that

the game would most especially aim to provoke. It is not only Hernandez

who is forced to play the game, but the TSA officials also become impli-

cated in its structure and rhetoric. Hernandez’s detention and deporta-

tion demonstrates the danger that the game presents in the eyes of the

TSA officials: without this double risk of banishment and provocation,

the game would fail to register any political or activist potential.

It bears repeating that Corridos, like the narco- corridos, was a com-

missioned work, its expressed pedagogical purpose, as Hernandez re-

counts, “to gain deeper cross- understanding” about the U.S.–Mexico bor-

der, “for both the peoples of Mexico and the U.S.” Even with the awareness

that the insistence on an educational mission constitutes a kind of juridi-

cal defense, Corridos, and the festival of which it was a part, perform the

very reverse engineering called for by Critical Art Ensemble.105 Within

border­HackS64

a regime of signs, when border control is a “symbolic performance” of

security, the (temporary) provocation of tactical media is to reveal those

signs to be mutable. What DoEAT and the other artists here present is a

mutability of signs, symbolic performances, that speak to material con-

ditions that are far less plastic and mutable.

65

The lesson is that the army must fight where the war is, and the war

will go where the people are. In 1814, everybody was on foot. In 1914,

they were on trains. In 1940, they were in cars. In 2040, they will be

in avatars.

—­edward­caStroNova,­Synthetic­worlds

Virtuous war has taken on the properties of a game, with high

production values, mythic narratives, easy victories, and few bodies.

—­JameS­der­deriaN,­“war­as­Game”

Virtual War

Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s near- future graphic novel Shooting

War (online version May–September 2006) begins with a certain self-

consciousness about narrative self- presentation in the age of Web 2.0.

“My name is Jimmy Burns,” announces the anticorporate video blogger

and Global News reporter. Having inadvertently streamed a suicide

bomb attack on a Starbucks in the trendy Williamsburg neighborhood

of Brooklyn, Jimmy Burns has become an overnight media sensation

and has been sent to Iraq to capture, “live in hi- def,” the real horror of

the war that has “gone to hell in a humvee,” looking “more and more like

Saigon ’75 every day.”1 (The emphasis on real time parallels the novel’s

initial weekly serialization, which to some degree allowed for authorial

response to both present events and reader comments.) It is 2011, the

eighth year of the war, and the United States under President McCain

has become even more deeply mired in the near- apocalyptic quagmire.

As Jimmy reports in his blog, “Burn Baby Burn,” rumors of American-

organized, Salvadoran- style death squads abound, but “the problem of

trying to verify any of it is near impossible. Ever since the Pentagon got

2. Virtual War: Information Visualization and Persuasive Gaming

virtual­war66

busted enlisting Pixar to create al- Zarqawi’s successor out of 0s and 1s,

getting straight answers out of the military is like asking James Frey

what he learned in prison.”2 Not simply ironic commentary on computer-

generated imagery, this moment in the text indicates a deep understand-

ing of the virtual aspects of war. So, too, the inadvertent live feed of the

bomb, along with a forced sat- cam uplink of a beheading, points to our

fascination with the capture of death events on tape and offers a sly cri-

tique of the new society of the spectacle. But the larger point here con-

cerns the 0s and 1s, for Shooting War takes as axiomatic the virtuality of

warfare. Thus is it the case, then, that one frame of the novel features a

bored NBC correspondent at a United Nations peacekeeper’s press brief-

ing in Baghdad playing a Sony PlayStation Portable video game of the

Iraq war.3

This is not, however, a chapter that will offer a new thesis on the spec-

tacularization of war, the virtualization of war, or war itself as a game

space. Extensive and varied critical commentary on these issues began

with the first Gulf War, most notably by Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio,

and James Der Derian. Baudrillard’s provocative statement that “the

Gulf War did not take place” provides us with an ideal starting point,

suggesting as it does one of the primary themes of this book: the seem-

ing antinomy between materiality and virtuality.4 That the Gulf War

should not have taken place does not for Baudrillard mean that there

are not material effects— even Shooting War, for all of its investment in

mediation and televisual spectacles, takes pains to depict the bodily in

gruesome detail. It does mean, however, that the Gulf War ushered in a

new era of warfare, a qualitatively different kind of enterprise, war that

could no longer be understood in its conventional meaning. Baudrillard

writes: “Today we see the shreds of this war rot in the desert just like

the shreds of the map in Borges’ fable rotting at the four corners of the

territory (moreover, strangely, he situates his fable in the same oriental

regions of the Empire). Fake war, deceptive war, not even the illusion

but the disillusion of war, linked not only to defensive calculation, which

translates into the monstrous prophylaxis of this military machine, but

also to the mental disillusion of the combatants themselves, and to the

global disillusion of everyone else by means of information” (68). The

virtual­war 67

function of the fake war, nonwar, virtual war, is deterrence: “Electronic

war no longer has any political objective strictly speaking: it functions

as a preventative electroshock against any future conflict” (84). A line is

initially drawn, then, between Virilio and Baudrillard, with Virilio bet-

ting on intensification and “apocalyptic escalation” and Baudrillard on

“deterrence and the indefinite virtuality of war”; however, as Baudrillard

explains, war moves simultaneously in both directions (49).

To engage the discourse of virtual war means returning to James

Der Derian’s Antidiplomacy (1992), which poignantly concludes: “I am

merely offering a cautionary tale, of how the technical preparation, exe-

cution, and reproduction of the Gulf War created a new virtual— and

consensual— reality: the first cyberwar, in the sense of a technologically

generated, televisually linked, and strategically gamed form of violence

that dominated the formulation as well as the representation of U.S.

policy in the Gulf.”5 The echoes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, with

its articulation of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” are not ac-

cidental, anchoring as they do Der Derian’s analysis of “a war of simula-

tions” in the dystopian discourse of cyberpunk: this, then, is the geneal-

ogy that informs Shooting War.6 There are echoes here as well of Virilio,

particularly in the examination of “technologically generated” simula-

tions and optical regimes of management and control. In this vein, Der

Derian explains: “In modern warfare, as the aim of battle shifts from ter-

ritorial, economic, and material gains to immaterial, perceptual fields,

the spectacle of war is displaced by the war of spectacle” (191). What I

wish to stress for the purposes of my argument is Der Derian’s somewhat

Anthony Lappé

and Dan Goldman,

Shooting War,

May 2006–.

virtual­war68

rueful account of the critical response to virtual warfare, to “a new war of

speed, surveillance, and spectacle” (176–77). Failing to recognize the fun-

damental epistemological shifts that warfare had undergone, the New

Left opposed the Gulf War as if it were an “old” war, one whose televisual

effects were limited to the living- room screens. As we will see from an

analysis of new media projects that focus on the war in Iraq, political

dissent and antiwar protest have themselves evolved to become virtual,

networked, and spectacular. Contemporary antiwar games, game space

performances, and information visualization projects make for a striking

comparison with Der Derian’s lamentation of the left’s misrecognition of

virtual war. Unlike the street- based protest movements during the first

Gulf War, these media projects match form to object. Their site for criti-

cal response is not the street but the network. As part of an embedded

critical practice, simulations are answered with countersimulations.

Here I must insert the necessary proviso that I do not intend to ar-

ticulate a comprehensive discourse of virtuality initiated by the first

Gulf War and brought to fulfillment with the current wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan, as if to erase the histories of other military campaigns. In

particular, the Balkans have been an important site of research on the

televisual, satellite witnessing, and other deployments of the CNN ef-

fect.7 Rather, what I aim to do here is to put the two moments into dia-

chronic relation. It is not simply the location, the geospatial coordinates,

that provide the grounds for comparison but also the nature of the war

effort (U.S. led rather than NATO sponsored) when what is at stake is

U.S. military, economic, and cultural power, literally imagined as the

New American Century.

The development of simulation and virtual reality technologies and

the deepening of the synergy between the military and entertainment

industries over the last fifteen years have contributed to the production

of the military- industrial- media- entertainment network, or MIME- Net,

as Der Derian has named it.8 If the battles of Vietnam were waged on

living- room screens, he explains, “the first and most likely the last battles

of the counter/terror war are going to be waged on global networks that

reach much more widely and deeply into our everyday lives.”9 It is in these

terms that we can understand Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s repeated

virtual­war 69

emphasis on the terrorists’ “media committees” and his suggestion that

the United States now battles “experts at manipulating the global media

to both inspire and intimidate.”10 Traditional forms of psychological

operations— leaflet distribution, radio communications— and the battle

for hearts and minds are no longer simply conducted “over there.” The

division between “here” and “there” matters little in the global battle to

control the message and to stage the definitive media event, the defini-

tive attack on the global network. This takes us into the realm of fan-

tastic speculation, risk and uncertainty: witness the many gaming sce-

narios for a Chinese- led bot attack on U.S. network architecture.

Of interest, then, is that the Joint Functional Component Command

for Network Warfare (JFCCNW), a relatively secret unit of U.S. Strate-

gic Command, publicly acknowledges two missions: defense and attack.

The more provocative of these, Computer Network Attack, ostensibly

involves interrupting enemy communications; destabilizing enemy com-

mand and control operations; and shutting down suspected terrorist

sites outside the United States, as well as those displaying videos of at-

tacks on U.S. citizens.11 The unit’s attack mission, in other words, is to

control the MIME- Net, however temporarily.

The highly touted Department of Defense doctrine of “force trans-

formation” has seen the transformation of the battlefield from the two-

dimensional phalanx with its tightly arranged rows of troops, to a four-

dimensional networked space.12 As Tim Blackmore explains in his recent

War X, “It is expected that war will be fought not in lines but in a four-

dimensional battle arena. Battlespace, as it is called, is intended to be

deep, high, wide, and simultaneous: there is no longer a front or rear.”13

Hovering in the background here is the theory of fourth- generation war-

fare (4GW), which is to be “nonlinear, possibly to the point of having

no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between ‘civilian’ and

‘military’ may disappear.”14 Running war games for this new battlespace

requires a massive industrial investment in simulations and computer-

based training systems (as of this writing, the annual sim budget alone

is estimated to be $4–6 billion).15 Manuel De Landa’s account of military

campaigns in the “age of intelligent machines” provides a thorough his-

torical account of the transformations in war- gaming technologies, of

virtual­war70

which I can only provide a snapshot: “Early war games were conducted

on two- dimensional maps, with enemy and friendly forces represented

by small wooden blocks. . . . After WWII, this institutional brain became

the think tank (Rand) and war games changed from tabletop exercises,

to computerized simulations. . . . In their latest version, the computer has

replaced not only the map but the human players as well, and war games

are now fought entirely by automata.”16 In the run- up to the Iraq war in the summer of 2002, the United States was somewhere in between

the actual and the virtual, rehearsing for the conflict with a three- week

Millennium Challenge, a $250 million war game that combined actual

forces with computer- generated models.17

As with much of the general contracting, military investment in

game- based training systems increasingly occurs through the private

sector, such as the U.S. Army’s partnership with the Institute for Crea-

tive Technologies at the University of South Carolina, where computer

scientists and “talent” from the gaming industry work collaboratively

to produce immersive training simulations for soldiers. These are not

simply force training exercises, as with the real- time combat game Full

Spectrum Warrior (2004), but also tactical and strategic exercises in

biopolitical control. Indeed there are sims such as Tactical Iraqi that teach soldiers population management alongside language and cultural

sensitivity training, these certainly part of the anthropological turn in

contemporary warfare (the Human Terrain System program is an ex-

emplary instance of such a turn).18 What results are models of defense

that do not predict or envision the future but produce it: to simulate

the enemy’s response is to fashion characters, scripts, narratives that

have the authority of the real. One of the many lessons of Edward Said’s

Orientalism was that representations of the Orient paved the way for

actual colonization and that paintings, poems, and theatrical produc-

tions were granted representational authority against which one judged

one’s own experience on the ground. So, too, gaming scenarios and other

simulational narratives have acquired representational authority and

the cultural knowledge they produce has the authority of the “real.” The

genre of the programmed rather than predictive simulation has many

exemplars, among them DARPA’s DARWARS program (a multiplayer

game- based training system); VECTOR: Virtual Environment Cultural

virtual­war 71

Training for Operational Readiness (wherein the “culture of interest” is

the Iraqi Kurds); and Forterra Systems’ Asymmetric Warfare–Virtual

Training Technology, which uses their OLIVE (On- Line Interactive Vir-

tual Environment) Platform.19

What has been the artistic response to the networked battlefield, to

what has been termed, variously, virtual war, cyberwar, netwar, and

postmodern war? Of course, one could argue that the war in Iraq at this

stage, for all its guerrilla and sectarian ground- level urban warfare, is

not a virtual war at all. Rather, it is “new,” as Martin Van Creveld would

argue, precisely because of the absence of conventional battles and the

inefficacy of sophisticated high- tech weaponry against nonstate actors

whose primary allegiances are to tribe, religion, mosque, and family.20

Or, as John Robb suggests, it is new because of the emphasis on sys-

tems disruption and the particular combination of low- tech weapons

and open- source innovations.21 Regardless, there has been a strong criti-

cal and artistic response to the representation of network war— the spec-

tacularized weaponry, computer displays featured in the background in

briefings from Centcom, optics of the bomb captured by onboard cam-

eras. How have new media artists engaged the embedded representation

of war and the new reality effect it has produced? There is another side

to the virtualization theses of Baudrillard and Der Derian, another side

to the virtual elements and aspects of war. In short, there is now a cer-

tain kind of effort to evolve the virtual effects of war into a mode of resis-

tance. The dystopian fictional vision of the U.S. military digitally coding

al- Zarqawi’s successor suggests a virtual war, one that does not regis-

ter in material space. However, in these projects we will see a reasser-

tion of virtual effects not as “disillusion” (Baudrillard) but as resistance.

Representation has had to catch up to the new, transformed battlefield.

From Critical Art Ensemble’s recognition that the “streets are dead

capital,” we have moved to modes of protest such as antiwar games, the

visualization of ordnance and casualty statistics, and performances of

dissent within game spaces. This is not to suggest that there are not intri-

cate hybrid modes of protest that combine the street and the network, the

actual and the virtual. Witness We Interrupt This Empire, a collaborative

video project by the San Francisco Video Activist Network (May 2003)

that documents the financial district protests in San Francisco after the

virtual­war72

U.S. invasion of Iraq.22 Witness, further, the mobilization of smart mobs

and TXTMobs for antiwar activism, as with the Web- to- SMS coordi-

nated protests during the Republican convention in New York.23 Though

they are not my object here, there have also been isolated hacktivist at-

tacks spreading antiwar messages through low- level government sites

and seemingly random sites such as cabbagesoupdiet.com. Unlike the

SWARM the Minutemen campaign, however, these have not been coor-

dinated attacks and have not tended to hit sites such as the Department

of Defense.24 Regardless, all these artist- activists are engaging in a kind

of asymmetric warfare, obliquely borrowing their rationale and strate-

gies of action from a Rand Corporation paper on the subject:

In its ideal and most extreme form, asymmetric warfare causes a cascading

effect that is out of proportion to the effort invested. Asymmetric approaches,

therefore, often seek a major psychological impact to produce shock and con-

fusion and thereby affect the opponent’s will, initiative, and freedom of ac-

tion. This condition, whether it is called disruption or disorganization, in turn

creates conditions whereby an inferior force can gain conventional advantage

over a superior force. Such approaches are applicable at all levels of warfare—

strategic, operational, and tactical— and can employ or affect one or more ele-

ments of national power.25

As this chapter will demonstrate, these artists are aware of the strat-

egy of asymmetry, and their projects are at least invested with the wish-

fulfillment of asymmetric effects. In gaming and visualization strate-

gies alike, we will see an attempt to disrupt and to disorganize, to use

technological expertise to advantage, to have a disarming psychological

effect— in other words, to locate the “systempunkt.” While some of these

projects employ asymmetric strategies of disruption, competing as they

do on the virtual battlefield, others engage less in terms of confrontation

than in taking up the project of memorialization.

Digihad

The preceding chapter ended with the imagined threat of video games

to national security, a topic that will now come more directly to the fore.

The 9/11 Commission Report sets the stage:

virtual­war 73

Khallad adds that the training involved using flight simulator computer games,

viewing movies that featured hijackings, and reading flight schedules to deter-

mine which flights would be in the air at the same time in different parts of the

world. They used the game software to increase their familiarity with aircraft

models and functions, and to highlight gaps in cabin security.26

Games and simulations are an emerging focus for InfoOp campaigns,

InfoOps, like PsyOps, a set of biopolitical techniques developed to com-

bat what goes by the name of cyber- terrorism. A topic warranting a

certain gravitas, cyber- terrorism has been the stuff of both collective

fantasy and think tank communiqués, particularly after 9/11.27 Network

attacks figure largely in planning scenarios, but the mission continu-

ally foregrounded almost above all else is “strategic communications”—

recruitment, propaganda, and training— again, control of the MIME- Net.

On May 4, 2006, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International

Security Affairs Peter Rodman appeared before the House Intelligence

Committee to report on “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Strategic Com-

munications.”28 Representative Hoekstra outlined the political stakes in

his introduction to the hearing, noting that it is “critical we understand

that the global war on terror is not just being fought on land, it is being

fought in cyberspace as well.”29 Thus, with the expert testimony of two

external intelligence contractors, Rodman presented his briefing, a sur-

vey of visual material reported to have been taken from “adversary web-

sites,” all of which was to provide the congressional audience with “a

synopsis of our adversary’s broad propaganda efforts beyond Iraq and,

indeed, beyond the Middle East” (3–4). The synopsis, Rodman insisted,

would reveal clearly coordinated extremist activities: “There is a plan. It’s

not just a random sampling of multimedia product that’s on the Internet”

(8). Such was his introduction to the presentation proper, which was pre-

pared and delivered by two contractors from San Diego –based Science

Applications International Corp. (SAIC), which has been funded with a

multiyear $7 million contract from the Department of Defense to pro-

vide intelligence support for the war on terror, in this particular instance

to outline the contours of the “propaganda machine” (15).

The content of that briefing on terrorist use of the Internet, specifi-

cally the treatment of games as weapons, was sensationally reported by

virtual­war74

the Reuters writer David Morgan, whose article “Islamists Using U.S.

Video Games in Youth Appeal” was picked up by wire services, news-

papers, and blogs worldwide.30 Its summary lead stated: “The makers

of combat video games have unwittingly become part of a global propa-

ganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up

arms against the United States, officials said on Thursday.” Highlighting

the presentation of game play footage from Battlefield 2: Special Forces

as evidence of the use of games for purposes of recruitment to jihadist or-

ganizations, Morgan provided this narrative account of the hearing:

Tech- savvy militants from al- Qaeda and other groups have modified video

war games so that U.S. troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights

against heavily armed Islamic radical heroes, a defense department official

and contractors told Congress. . . . Battlefield 2 ordinarily shows U.S. troops

engaging forces from China or a united Middle East coalition. But in a modi-

fied video trailer posted on Islamic Web sites and shown to lawmakers, the

game depicts a man in Arab headdress carrying an automatic weapon into

combat with U.S. invaders. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my

village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed

between images of street- level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults.

Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001,

statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It

was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an at-

tack on Islam by Christianity.31

Avid consumers of pop culture and gamers might already be in on the

joke(s): the media object described is a fan film and not a mod.32 After

watching the opening minutes of the work in question, even those with

a modicum of knowledge of contemporary Hollywood film would sense

that something was not quite right about the claim that this is an instance

of militant Islamic psy- ops. To start with, the lines beginning “I was just

a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters” are

lifted from the film Team America and spoken by South Park cocreator

Trey Parker, whose distinctive voice is clearly audible in the footage pre-

sented during the congressional hearings. Tipped off by these oft- quoted

lines, the knowledge that Battlefield 2 allows players to switch sides, and

by the visual rhetoric, Dvorak board member JulieB identified this video

immediately after the publication of the Reuters article and located its

real source: a fan film by BF2 player SonicJihad.33 SonicJihad, who is

virtual­war 75

actually Samir, a twenty- five- year- old Moroccan Dutch hospital worker

with a master’s degree in management, economics, and law, advertised

his video on the Planet Battlefield Forum in December 2005 with the

following note: “Be sure to download it, it’s my first so . . . Suggestionz

are welcome. I’ve also used a lot of footage from members. Like JihadJoe

(Thanxxx in advange 4 that) So be sure to check it out! It’s a big down-

load though, but worth it guaranteed!!!!!!!”34

SonicJihad used the standard expansion pack to present gameplay

from the opposing side, and indeed the first and fairly damning critique

from the Planet Battlefield Forum has to do with the use of found foot-

age. The day after SonicJihad posted his video, Reconmaster replied:

“I like the way half your footage is other people’s stuff. . . . Most of the

footage was made by EA Games, Band of Zeros Clan, and most of all

‘Burn it Down’ by JihadJoe/Qc/.”35 (BF2 player JihadJoe shot most of the

Fraps video used by SonicJihad; Band of Zeros has made another BF2

video.) So, too, ArmageddonGuy pointed out the video’s redundancies but

SonicJihad, Battlefield 2 fan film, December 2005.

virtual­war76

encourages the “first timer” to try again. The board consensus: the video

is unoriginal, too long, too repetitive, even perhaps too boring. The intel-

ligence contractors were perhaps less discriminating. In a GamePolitics

interview in the wake of the publicity surrounding the misidentification

and sensation surrounding the possibility of jihadists’ modifying video

games for training and propagandistic purposes, SonicJihad protests: “It

is just in game footage from SF [BF2: Special Forces], no self made mod

at all. I can’t get even my own computer to work. . . . That crusade part

was some audio clip with a ‘combat tune’ underneath it, that I found on-

line. . . . I was just looking for music that fit a ‘jihad’ story and sounded

middle- eastern. Most of the sounds are from the movie called Lion of the

Desert with Anthony Quinn. And it just fit the movie that I was trying

to make.”36 In this comment, we might say there is a direct echo of the

SAIC enterprise: “We were just looking for a video to fit a jihad story

and sounded Middle Eastern.” The fundamental misidentification makes

all the more ironic the contractors’ professed pursuit of ethnographic

truth. As they note at the outset of the congressional hearing, “Our ana-

lysts employ a method called full cultural context, where we team native

speakers with fluent, culturally aware analysts.”37

We can start, then, with the apparent surface: there is a disjunction

between the importance ascribed to video games and the misinterpreta-

tion and sheer misreading of them, and the irony lies in this disjunction.

But a more sinister and complicated reading is also available: what if

we were to imagine that the intelligence contractors and Department

of Defense officials were in fact able to read the content of the fan film

ideologically and formally? What if we were to imagine that— contra

Rodman’s insistence that they “don’t know who built the plug- ins” and

that it was an unknown “Internet offer”— they were aware that at issue

was the Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 2: Special Forces add- on module,

and could in fact discern the difference between an add- on and mod?38

Would this not, then, be a cunning misappropriation and misuse of the

fan f ilm as a form of counter propaganda, necessitating a greater f i-

nancial, juridical, political, and libidinal investment in the projects of

national security and intelligence analysis? Far- fetched it may seem,

the stuff of dystopian science fiction, which is precisely why counter-

appropriation seems a plausible explanation. Or, at the least, we could

virtual­war 77

say that after the evidentiary claims made during Colin Powell’s United

Nations presentation on the weapons of mass destruction trailers, cul-

tural critics are well advised to regard governmental analyses of visual

materials with a certain skepticism. (It is not surprising that scholars

such as Edward Tufte would have been critically interested in the form

and content of Powell’s evidentiary presentation.)39

Regardless, the incident of the video introduces a model of the “enemy”

as at once amateur and professional, primitive and technologized. Dur-

ing the congressional hearings, the contractors emphasized simulta-

neously the “oral tradition” and the technological capacity of terrorist

groups: “They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of

oral tradition, if you will.”40 SonicJihad claims not to have tech skills— “I

can’t even get my own computer to work,” he protests— and it is notable

that he used a trial version of the video capture software Fraps to pro-

duce his fan film, which includes the prominent warning “Digital Media

Converter Trial Version. Please Register.” Such would be the expected

sign of an enemy that has been constructed as ad hoc, low- tech, non-

statist, and therefore underfinanced, on the one hand, yet, on the other,

part of a coordinated, savvy, and technologically sophisticated “media

committee” that stays on message. The fear of a mediatized enemy, of

distributed terrorist cells and networks, is brought to the fore in the first

report outlining the Bush administration’s doctrine of U.S. national se-

curity one year after the 9/11 attacks: “Shadowy networks of individuals

can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to

purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open socie-

ties and to turn the power of modern technologies against us” (italics

mine).41 This in a nutshell is the narrative of the new generation of war-

fare: we have moved from great armies who bring their own formidable

weaponry to the battlefield to the “shadowy networks” primitive enough

to need to modify the West’s technology and skilled enough to do it.

It makes intuitive sense, then, that Rodman would emphasize the threat

of modding during the hearing: “What we do see is that any video game

that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and

change the game for their needs.”42 Of course, as JulieB and then numer-

ous others pointed out, SonicJihad’s fan film was not a mod; rather, the

first- person perspective shifts between that of the MEC (Middle Eastern

virtual­war78

Coalition) and the U.S. Marine Corps. Switching sides, as it were, and

playing from the position of “terrorist” in games such as Counter­ Strike

is common practice, and the release of BF2: Special Forces made it pos-

sible as well to play from the perspective of “insurgent”; in multiplayer

situations, you choose among four forces. The threat perceived by the

contractors is what Alexander Galloway might identify as the realism

of the first- person perspective, which first establishes a connection

between the social reality of the gamer and the subject position of the

game.43 That identificatory alignment makes possible a certain illicit se-

duction, as one of the contractors suggests: “you can see where the games

are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces.”44 The

misidentification of the video and the subsequent erroneous report by

Reuters prompted media outlets such as the Australian Media Watch

to attempt to induce a certain shame or at least humility on the part of

the Department of Defense. In response to a program organizer’s query,

however, Lt. Col. Barry Venable continued to insist on the threat to na-

tional security posed by those we might call digihadists:

Who made the game modification or why they made it is irrelevant to the point

of the briefing or the aim of our research. What the committee was told [was]

that the game modifications, as one part of the larger overall propaganda cam-

paign being executed by these extremist groups on the internet, are being

used by extremists (they don’t respect intellectual property rights) as a “call to

arms” in conjunction with other efforts to elicit sympathy with the extremist

cause.45

The key word here is “sympathy.” As with The 9/11 Commission Report,

which noted that training “involved using flight simulator computer

games [and] viewing movies that featured hijackings,” what is at stake

are sympathy and identification.46 Just as the cinematic imagination in-

vites a certain cathexis from the viewer, so, too, does the first- person

perspective. Representation, or in this case simulation, paves the way for

real experience.

In a New York Times editorial following the July 7 attacks in Lon-

don, Thomas Friedman pursues a speculation floated by the Wall Street

Journal: al- Qaeda and the London bombers were connected by the Iqra

Learning Center in Leeds, the only distributor of Islamic militant video

games produced by Islamgames, a U.S.- based company.47 Friedman is

virtual­war 79

troubled by the bombers’ patronage of the bookstore but even more so by

the games themselves: “The video games feature apocalyptic battles be-

tween defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I,

has the world ‘finally united under the Banner of Islam’ in 2114, until

a revolt by disbelievers. The player’s goal is to seek out and destroy the

disbelievers.” The “disbelievers,” it should be noted, are robots. And, as a

member of the Intergalactic Muslim Council, your mission is to defend

against the Flying Evil Robot Armada (FERM).

Such is the cultural status of Friedman and the paper of record that

the Slate columnist Chris Suellentrop set about playing the Islam games

in question to weigh in on their significance: “The fact that these games

are derivative, look primitive, and aren’t very fun to play doesn’t mean

they’re not important. But they’re also ideologically untroubling. . . .

There’s an outside chance that the robots are a metaphor for the Predator

drones used by the United States military, but I doubt these games are

going for that level of subtlety. It’s more likely that the robots are a meta-

phor for Space Invaders.”48 To use Galloway’s terms, a game such as

Islamgames, Ummah Defense I, 2004.

virtual­war80

Ummah Defense I fails to meet the “congruence requirement” in that there

is no “fidelity of context that transliterates itself from the social reality of

the gamer, through one’s thumbs, into the game environment and back

again.”49 Robots and infidels, in other words, somehow do not match up.

One game in which there would be such a congruence requirement is

Special Force, a Hezbollah- produced, open- source 3- D game that simu-

lates attacks against Israeli troops. Claimed to embody “objectively

the defeat of the Israeli enemy and the heroic actions taken by heroes

of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon,” the game resonates all the more

strongly days into the latest war.50 Its genre is that of the historical war

game— it is based on events of 1978 and 1982 and Israeli intervention in

southern Lebanon— but in the weight given to 1978, particularly because

Hezbollah was not founded until 1982, the game’s archive of cultural

memory is situated somewhere between realism and revisionism. Such a

continuum would be demarcated by Kuma\War (a freely downloadable

first- and third- person squad- based episodic game that features playable

re- creations of real events of the Iraq war) on one end and, on the other,

Daisenryaku 1941 (a PlayStation 2 game in which the player commands

the Japanese Imperial Army and tries to guide it to victory).

Special Force is also of a piece with Under Ash, a pro- Palestinian tra-

ditional first- person shooter made by a programming team in Syria. In

this ultimately unwinnable game, in which the “terrorists” are Israelis

and “freedom fighters” their enemies, players must destroy Israeli

Merkava tanks and save the al- Asqa mosque from arson. The incendi-

ary controversy over radical war games and the real and imagined con-

nections between video games and global terrorism has even led to the

parodic British Organisation for the Eradication of Fundamentalist

Islamic Videogame Training, which suggests a link between games such

as Counter­ Strike and Half­ Life and militant Islam. One of the warning

signs for concerned parents is typing in the secret code that terrorists

use to disguise their communications. An example: “Omg lol u sux0r!!

/\11ah pwnsj00 all!!!!1— Literal translation: ‘You are all infidels, Allah

is God.’ ”51 (This is not wholly comic: in his analysis of gaming worlds,

even Edward Castronova imagines the possible uses of Counter­ Strike

as a terrorist training tool.)52 Mocking the pseudoscientific statistical

calculation that characterizes such presentations as the congressional

virtual­war 81

hearing on terrorist use of the Internet (during which percentages of

the Web dedicated to adversarial gaming and propaganda were offered),

British Organisation for the Eradication of Fundamentalist Islamic Video

Game Training (BOEFIVGT) announces: “By our estimates, four out of

every six successful recent suicide bombers have played Islamic mods

for Doom or Quake, or downloaded Infidel Blood Jihad 2000 (a popular

Web game) within six months of their detonations.”53

Friedman, though, has a larger point, which is that we are embroiled

in a global “war of ideas”— at first glance this has pronounced echoes

of both a “hearts and minds” campaign and Huntington’s “clash of

civilizations”— and that the State Department ought therefore to pro-

duce “a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those re-

ligious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.” To

emphasize the extent to which the war of ideas, the war against terror,

the global struggle against violent extremism, or however it is named

is being fought on the MIME- Net, I offer two examples. First is a rap

video, “Dirty Kuffar,” by Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew, which

Special Force.

virtual­war82

was posted to the Web site of Mohammed al- Massari, a Saudi dissident

based in the UK.54 Designed to inspire people to take up a jihad against

the West, this video, we might note, would have been a better candidate

for the congressional committee hearings, its clear message an exhorta-

tion to the faithful to “kill the crusaders” and “be prepared for battle

with the infidels.” There is a certain paradox to the balaclava- clad rapper

with what seems, albeit retroactively, a faint Yorkshire accent holding

the Koran with the Syrian flag in the background: the video is clearly

embedded in Western culture even as it calls for a crusade against that

culture. Al- Massari’s claims to the contrary, we might speculate that the

video’s makers would probably be condemned by those who so believe in

a kind of purity that they would view the filmmakers as wholly corrupted

by the West.

Although I might seem to be reinforcing the radical religious split of

an imagined holy war, the second example is the current phenomenon of

extremist Christian games such as Left Behind: Eternal Forces (October

2006 release), the mission for which is to “conduct physical and spiritual

warfare,” in other words, to convert with extreme prejudice.55 Within

the game space, “a breathtaking, authentic depiction of New York City,”

your targets are all infidels, including modern Christians, who will not

convert to evangelical Christianity and die to chants of “Praise the Lord”

(the exact double of “Allah Akbar,” audio clips of which were included in

SonicJihad’s video). Progressive as it is, Eternal Forces allows you to play

either with the Tribulation Force or with the Antichrist’s army of Global

Community Peacekeepers.

Spectacular as the evangelical Eternal Forces promises to be, its pow-

ers of propaganda (which are contained for the most part in the back-

story and accompanying Left Behind novels) will no doubt pale in com-

parison to the paradigmatic recruiting game: America’s Army, a freely

downloadable first- person shooter released to the public in blockbuster

fashion on July 4, 2002, so that “young Americans could explore soldier-

ing in the U.S. Army.”56 Developed by the MOVES Institute of the Naval

Postgraduate School (Monterey, California) and initially aimed toward

teenagers, America’s Army’s objective was to present an “accurate por-

trayal of a soldier’s experience,” to “substitute virtual experiences for

vicarious insights,” and to give young players an “inside perspective”

virtual­war 83

on what it is like to be a soldier. Players proceed from basic training at

Fort Benning, Georgia, to Special Forces Assessment and Selection at

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and are offered both diversionary entertain-

ment and concrete information. In the shift from a draft- based to an all-

volunteer military there has been a decline from 30 percent to 10 percent

of population with military service, with those numbers concentrated

in the lower socioeconomic classes. Absent a sizable, and middle- class,

population of veterans able to provide firsthand accounts of military ex-

perience, there was a perceived need to find the means by which such

information could be transmitted. Enter the multiplayer combat simula-

tion, which at this writing has nearly nine million registered accounts.57

In the last section of this chapter, I address Joseph DeLappe’s dead­ in­

Iraq (March 2006–), an artistic performance and intervention within

the game space of America’s Army. To fully appreciate his audience and

the disruptive gesture of his work, it is necessary to understand the scale

and cultural positioning of the game itself.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces, 2006.

virtual­war84

Antiwar Games

If the first U.S. war in the Persian Gulf inaugurated the discourse on war

as a game, the second has given us the antiwar game. In a well- known

analysis of an interview between Cokie Roberts and General Norman H.

Schwarzkopf, Der Derian succinctly captures the cultural logic of the

first historical moment. Roberts begins by asking, “Is there any sort of

danger that we don’t have any sense of the horrors of war— that it’s all

a game?” Schwarzkopf replies, “There are human lives being lost, and

at this stage of the game this is not a time for frivolity.” Der Derian

seizes on this slip to point out that “in the space of a single sound- bite

Schwarzkopf reveals the inability of the military and the public to main-

tain the distinction between warring and gaming in the age of video.”58

The canonical fictional text here, of course, is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s

Game, which envisioned the collapse of the distinction between war

and game long before the bombing of Baghdad appeared to Roberts

and CNN viewers worldwide as a video game. Along with Der Derian,

Bruce Sterling responded to Gulf War I with a thorough investigative

article on “modern Nintendo war” and the convergence of the American

military- industrial complex and technologies of simulation and virtual

reality.59 John Naisbitt followed with the phrase “Military- Nintendo

Complex,” which he coined to describe the synthesis of military com-

puter simulations and computer games.60 It is also worth mentioning

Peter Watkins’s film The Gladiators (1970) and the strikingly similar call

by Stewart Brand in his II Cybernetic Frontiers for the development of

“softwar,” by which he meant the shifting of war activities to separate,

enclosed, vaguely gladiatorial arenas. For the perfect metaphor— and

literalization— of the imbrication of the military and culture industries,

we need look no further than the Unreal game engine, which is the basis

of not only Tactical Iraqi and America’s Army but also BioShock, Gears

of War, and numerous other games. Thus is it the case that we have to

regard the MIME- Net as a singular entity, from which it is nearly im-

possible to separate out the component parts.

How do new media artist- activists, particularly those already involved

with game production, respond to the figuration of war as itself a game?

How does an antiwar game engage the representation of real war games?

The “Toywar” is instructive on this issue. Much has been written of the

virtual­war 85

battle over domain names between etoy, the European artists collective,

and eToys, the online retailer, so I will not review that history here; but

I do want to distill the battle into the image of a virtual attack against a

virtual corporation.61 As Ricardo Dominguez has suggested of the affair,

“Electronic civil disobedience is an extremely useful tool when dealing

with a virtual organization that is only virtual.”62 When one’s targets are

networked rather than physical and grounded, in other words, the battle

has to be taken to the network. For this reason, antiwar games operate

in the virtual space of war.

Various terms have been deployed to describe the category that would

hold together Dominguez’s Turista Fronterizo, Fajardo’s Crosser and La

Migra, and the games I address in this section: “games with an agenda,”

“games with a conscience,” “political games,” “consequential games,” “se-

rious games.”63 Regardless of nomenclature, “persuasive gaming” con-

tains a political critique in the simulation rules. The game mechanics,

in other words, make political arguments. In a co- curated show at the

London Curzon Soho (October 2004), Ian Bogost describes “a new gen-

eration of artists and activists [who] are using videogames as a way to

communicate their views on society, international politics and corporate

power.”64 Therein we can see an insistence that games need not function

as mere entertainments: just as military sims suture education and en-

tertainment, so, too, does persuasive gaming critically comment on mat-

ters such as war, national security, and immigration while still retaining

the ludic component.65 It does so via its “procedural rhetoric,” as Bogost

describes it, “the way that a videogame embodies ideology in its compu-

tational structure.”66 In Bogost’s analysis, procedural rhetoric is a tech-

nique both for game production and for game analysis. Linguistic and

visual rhetorics, he argues, cannot adequately address computational

processes— either within games or within software systems. Procedural

rhetoric, then, augments an ideological and narratological critique by

attending to algorithms, the rules that do not simply generate formal

systems but also generate a perspective and a way of thinking about for-

mal systems.67 With the Tate Online–hosted agoraXchange project in

mind, we can also look ahead to a moment in which persuasive gaming

will perform an even more intricate synthesis of poiesis and praxis by

widening its scope from the individual to the group. (AgoraXchange is

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Natalie Bookchin and Jacqueline Stevens’s online community formed

for the public discussion and planning of a multiplayer game of global

politics “challenging the violence and inequality of our present politi-

cal system.”)68 At present, then, we have an art practice that is more in

the realm of description than prescription. As the Newsgaming team ex-

plains, “we will use games and simulations to analyze, debate, comment

and editorialize major international news.”69 Persuasive gaming advo-

cates for social change, but it does not run the kind of gaming scenarios

possible in sims- type environments.

My first object is Newsgaming’s September 12: A Toy World (2003), in

which players fire missiles onto an unnamed Middle Eastern city. Target

sights suggest the precision of surgical strikes, but the target is quite

large proportionate to the grid of the city, and the inevitable collateral

damage causes civilians to respawn as terrorists, with sounds of wailing

accompanying the deaths of civilians and the destruction of buildings.

The simulation rules for September 12 might very well have been taken

from William S. Lind’s primer for “Guerrilla War 101”: “Air power works

against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy,

recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your

enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mor-

tars.”70 What the game teaches us, in other words, is that neither the game

nor the war on terror can be won with the bombing strategies of modern

warfare. It violates one of the basic principles of game mechanics, then,

by making winning impossible. Indeed, the game designers explain:

“This is a simulation. It has no ending. It has already begun. The rules

are deadly simple. You can shoot. Or not. This is a simple model you

can use to explore some aspects of the war on terror.”71 The basic game

mechanics, its “simple model,” are such that not playing is the best way

to play: a clear antiwar message if there ever were one. But there are

more intricate ideas communicated by the game than this basic polemic

would imply. For example, the city is laid out, inscribed, on top of a

manuscript page, its textuality suggesting its constructedness and the

construction of the enemy. The game works closely with the figure of

the visible enemy, which can be seen and therefore destroyed. On the

one- dimensional space of the map there is no underground, no caves,

cellars, or other sites to provide cover from precision- guided munitions

and thwart the missions of surveillance and reconnaissance. In this re-

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spect, September 12 offers the fantasy of optical power, of the ability to

keep your target in constant sight, and the fulfillment of a “global vision”

promised by satellite and drone technologies.72 There are further con-

vergences between the game and the discourse on enmity. Within this

game space, the enemy proliferates as an anonymous swarm, just as the

cells of al- Qaeda are imagined to reproduce. In sum, September 12 il-

lustrates a model of defense that strikes first against a virtual, unknown,

and unknowable enemy.

If we put September 12 into dialogue with post- 9/11 games such as

New York Defender and War on Terror, we can also see a clear inverse

relation between the certainty of these “missions” and the inherent un-

certainty of war as it has been theorized since Clausewitz. In New York

Defender, players have to shoot down planes flying toward the twin towers

of the World Trade Center. It is impossible to win the game, which in turn

suggests the impossibility of a complete defense; as recompense, the game

offers the tagline “Use your mouse to fight the feeling of impotence.”73

An ostensible cathartic release is similarly offered by War on Terror (De-

cember 2001): its three missions against the Taliban include cave recon-

naissance, hostage rescue, and an attack on a terrorist camp; a fourth

mission asks you to capture Bin Laden by punching him repeatedly in

the face, thus offering a mode of hands- on revenge.74 Again, we can see

a relation between the predictable outcomes of these games and the un-

predictable outcomes of war, a Deleuzian fantasy of using the virtual to

Newsgaming,

September 12:

A Toy World, 2003.

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enact the actual. The vague feelings of gratification at having “won” the

war on terror might also offer us a way to understand the ubiquity and

cultural fascination with first- person shooters, which, under the aca-

demic guise of agency, subjectivity, or interactivity, allow the individual

to act out in a seeming triumph of the will over both virtual actants and

an environment that is less hermetically sealed than we might be pre-

disposed to think.75

A shift in production environments and the use of Flash as authoring

tool has made game production both easier and more common. It has

also encouraged a cartoon aesthetic and led to the rendering of histori-

cally grounded situations and events in 2- D, low- tech game spaces. For

example, Wild West Bank works with basic game mechanics in whack- a-

mole style to portray the difficulties of disengaging the Jewish settlers in

Palestinian areas.76 Produced by Back to Israel, an Israeli antisettlement

group, the game’s object is to disband the settlements, at times by mov-

ing the guards, who respond to their removal with expressions of joy, out

of the West Bank. Like September 12, the game cannot really be won: the

settlements appear with increasing speed and frequency and eventually

surround the nomadic Palestinian game characters.77 A political cartoon

it may be, but the material referent, the game designers insist, is itself

“not a game.” The larger question looms: what does it mean to abstract

complex and situated events within the generalized structure of a game

space, with its basic logic of antagonism, friend and enemy?78 What are

the consequences and political purposes of this abstraction, which is

also a reduction? As I have suggested, the cartoonish game spaces have

to do with the production environments and visual rhetoric in circula-

tion now (their aesthetic is more that of the early animated .gif than that

of the complex rendering of games such as America’s Army). But just as

the caricature game spaces of Fajardo’s Crosser and La Migra pointed

to the constructed category of “migrant,” in this context they succeed

in highlighting the constructed, one- dimensional categories of “enemy”

and “terrorist.”

I conclude this section with a look at a persuasive game that has more

in common with traditional war games than it does with Space Invaders.

Antiwargame (Josh On/Future Farmers, 2001) provides a critique of the

MIME- Net that unfolds during repeated gameplay.79 In the character

of the U.S. president (either Uncle Sam or Aunt Samantha), the player

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must respond to a terrorist attack by making budgetary allocations to

military/business, social spending, and foreign aid. If you make an in-

correct move, for example, allocate too much to social spending, you are

assassinated. Further, you are instructed to spend more on military/

business or “I can have you removed” so that “we will find a more pli-

able president.” Gameplay has a dynamic, responsive quality, such that

a budgetary decision has immediate repercussions: increased spending

on military/business produces a patriotic response from the media, and

presidential popularity increases with nearly every deployment. Mouse-

overs allow the player to see the responses of civilians, who seem to be

satisf ied with increased spending on domestic programs. Further, in-

creased spending on foreign aid causes the media to pronounce your

administration as fraudulent. As president, you also have the option of

sending those game characters who profess patriotic fervor that ranges

from the xenophobic to the merely nationalist into the U.S. Army or

National Guard; or you can deploy these characters abroad, where they

coalesce, drunk and stoned, in an unnamed country near a spouting oil

field. If the structure of cause and effect were insufficient to communi-

cate an argument, conceptual certainty would be communicated by the

paratext: if not the game title, then external links to news organizations

Democracy Now and Common Dreams and articles in the International

Socialist Review on Vietnam and U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

Josh On/Future Farmers, Antiwargame, 2001.

virtual­war90

The futility of gameplay and the relative simplicity of game mechanics

and design in persuasive gaming brings us to the question of the ambi-

guity and significance of the message. We have seen media projects that

stay clearly on message— the evangelical Left Behind: Eternal Forces

would be an exemplar— and reflect the radical polarization inherent in

the war on terror. However much we might labor to locate moments of

internal contradiction and ambiguity, we would not be able to explain

away the univocality of its mission. We have also seen instances of proj-

ects so shot through with irony and ambiguity that they would always

resist the pull into certainty. SonicJihad’s fan film— with its homage to

the visual rhetoric of Michael Bay and its formal and ideological align-

ment with the first- person perspective of the Middle Eastern Coalition—

would be one instance, particularly in that it is not designed with the

skill required to impose a univocality, a singular style, or distinctive

voice. Last, we have seen projects self- consciously situated on the line

between parody and the actual, as with the BOEFIVGT, which require if

not a sophisticated at least a time- intensive decoding. Such are the enig-

mas of persuasive gaming, which require repeated play to achieve the

moment of epiphany so well articulated by Espen Aarseth in his study of

ergodic texts.80 Moreover, epiphanies can be false and deceptive, offer-

ing us a glimpse of the master hermeneutic key before quickly resolving

back into aporia at best and banality at worst.

Visualizing War

My concluding section initially takes us back to one of the key axioms

informing Baudrillard’s provocative thesis about the Gulf War: the end

of the twentieth century was also the end of representation. Although

the simulacrum is not necessarily historically situated in his analysis—

in theory, one could locate it on the walls of Plato’s cave— there is none-

theless a clear sense that the real is now produced by simulation tech-

nologies, film, genetic engineering, television, and digital media. I would

like, though, to recast the end- of- representation axiom to suggest that

its disappearance coincides with the rise of information visualization as

an artistic and general practice. In the next chapter, we will see projects

devoted to the visualization of finance (market pricing, currency rates),

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Department of Defense ordnance data, and United Nations and World

Health Organization statistics. In this chapter, we will address strategies

of visualizing casualty counts. In all, the object of visualization practices

is data— statistical entities— rather than a concrete or “real” referent.

Already abstracted by the time it reaches the artists, this data is para-

doxically rematerialized in virtual environments. Information visualiza-

tion projects concerned with finance can be understood as attempts to

make the otherwise mysterious operations of markets generally legible;

so, too, visualization projects concerned with war can be understood as

attempts to produce an affective response otherwise diminished by the

numbing procession of statistics: fatalities, wounded, IED explosions,

suicide bombings.

John Klima’s project on the war in Afghanistan, The Great Game

(2001), was one of the first American artistic responses to 9/11 and the

subsequent military campaign that neither thematized mourning nor

took the razed towers of the World Trade Center as its object. Somewhat

in the mode of his earlier Serbian Skylight (1999), which also gathered

John Klima, The Great Game, October–November 2001.

virtual­war92

ordnance data from the Department of Defense, The Great Game 3- D

map project is generated by DoD records of the bombing campaign in

Afghanistan. Updated daily from October 7 through November 25, the

putative end of the campaign, The Great Game now sequentially displays

this information, the daily movement of military weapons and equip-

ment, and the transfer of territorial control from the Taliban to the

UN. (As the U.S. military campaign in the Middle East spread to Iraq,

Klima developed an “Iraq Expansion Pack & Campaign Maker v1.0”

for the project.)81 When viewed from this historical vantage point, the

“game’s” adopted directive, the takeover of Kabul and the elimination of

the Taliban, structures the sequencing of the information from the mili-

tary operation and gives it a teleology. The design and layout of Klima’s

“game” are highly suggestive of military strategy: the viewer is granted

an aerial view of the nearly flattened topographical map, which itself

evokes a board game. The primary colors and the icons used to signify

different weapons systems, equipment, controlled cities, and troops not

coincidentally echo the Cold War–era board game Risk, the quintessen-

tial game of war and global conquest. Since the topographical map can

be rotated to alter perspective and approach, the game also assumes the

optics of the video game and situates the viewer within the battle to the

extent that his or her line of sight approximates that of a participating

aircraft. The combined effect of the two game models is that of a carica-

tured war room made telepresent on one’s own computer screen.

In its echoing of Kipling and the Anglo- Russian battle for imperial

and territorial control in Central Asia, which led to the British conquest

and occupation of Afghanistan, Klima’s title could not be more apt. The

resonance of the title also extends to the area of global finance: The

Great Game is a fantasy stock- market trading game in which the players

build competitive portfolios on the UK market without risks, costs, or

consequences.82 In both instances, the gaming metaphor is suggestive

of the adventure, skill, rivalry, deal brokering, and insider intelligence

that characterize an ongoing contest unfolding with daily maneuvers.

The inheritance of the imperial territorial game is the neocolonial game

of financial speculation. And real risk is notably absented from both

the stock trading game and The Great Game. That is to say that Klima’s

game is not a game at all: one can navigate through the map and re center

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it, but without having any direct effect on the events playing out on the

screen.

While he self- consciously works with programmatic aspects of the

game (for example, the A* algorithm), Klima’s navigational structures do

not quite correspond with those of the game, since there are no narrato-

logical outcomes.83 Navigation, in other words, produces not a different

event but a different data visualization; for example, one can traverse

the map of Afghanistan and change its orientation, but it is not possible

to initiate any action. Because the movement of the icons or game pieces

across the topographical terrain is driven by the statistics that Klima col-

lected from the DoD daily briefings in the fall of 2001, the viewer is able

to watch the progression of the war and choose a certain visual perspec-

tive on the events without having a material or even ideological effect on

these events. Thus viewer response is not coded into or incorporated into

the system. (Similarly, one can navigate through the financial landscape

environment in ecosystm, but such navigation only changes perspective

and not the system itself.) How, then, is the viewer positioned by, and in

relation to, the aesthetic- militaristic spectacle of The Great Game? Is its

paradigm spectatorial or interactive?

Inasmuch as interacting with The Great Game involves limited physi-

cal engagement and does not produce outcomes that alter the course of

action, we might say initially that we are positioned as outsiders, sealed

off from the events and from the game itself. Can we, though, be po-

sitioned as neutral outsiders, spectators without complicity? In fact,

Klima’s work demonstrates our engagement in and by the game: we can-

not avoid feeling powerless to change the course of it, nor can we avoid

our participation in it. Moreover, the game reminds us that we cannot

be removed from our position of responsibility for that participation and

for our participation in the “old” empire of America. We are its audience,

recipients of the communicative messages embodied in the movement

of the icons around the game board. We are, then, fundamentally part

of the game and not, as we may initially be inclined to believe, mere

bystanders.

A physical installation and “epilogue” to The Great Game serves fur-

ther to illustrate this interplay between detachment and involvement,

distance and proximity. For two gallery shows in 2002, Klima installed

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the Game software onto what he calls “a coin- operated ‘kiddie ride,’ ” to

which he added video from an F- 16 bombing run and a wireless audio

track taken from Flight 93, the fourth, diverted plane on 9/11.84 Situating

the viewer in the seat of action in a helicopter, the physical version of

The Great Game embodies the optics of the video game. The helicop-

ter installation also embodies multiple perspectives in that it provision-

ally places the participant in the positions of passenger, hijacker, and

avenger after the fact. Thus the aerial view over Afghanistan granted

from the gallery helicopter ostensibly moves the “game” away from repre-

sentation and closer to the thing itself. What might appear to be a greater

proximity, however, is in fact a greater remove. The closer the viewer

“Epilogue” (The Great Game), installation view, 2002.

virtual­war 95

comes to a realized battlefield, the more clearly enveloped he or she be-

comes by the simulation. In this sense, the board game approaches the

real only through its remediation as a video game. Paradoxically, we are

further distanced from the real as war moves further into the realm of

simulation.

The use of ordnance statistics in The Great Game confirms this para-

dox. While these statistics form an interface for the real and animate the

events that we cannot see— as we were able to with the Gulf War— this

interface is by no means transparent. Rather, these real events are care-

fully filtered, processed, and represented. “Security” persists as the con-

cept that legitimates the intricate management of military data: what

could be more mediated at this moment than information issued by the

Department of Defense? The ordnance statistics constitute a double ab-

straction: they stand in for the real, yet they are mediated. Klima’s Game

captures this fundamental uncertainty about the authority of the sta-

tistics that we receive and reiterates their mediated quality, even to the

extent of fostering an ambiguity about the artist’s own intervention into

the data. As a consequence, the artist and critic Blackhawk notes, “We

are asked to define, not perhaps for all time, but for this exact moment

how clearly we comprehend the differences between the mediated evi-

dence of the momentous events we are presented with and our own con-

ditioned responses to the media itself and to the games and amusements

which increasingly have so many vectors in parallel or actually in com-

mon with it.”85 In that Klima inputs statistics from an official channel,

he foregrounds mediation. He generates a picture that we know to be

incomplete and not readily available, and he does not claim to produce

truth with the game. However, he does produce the truth of the impos-

sibility of getting to the truth. In this respect, The Great Game enforces

a distance from the thing, the event itself, and we are reminded that we

lack proximity. As Paul Virilio suggests, telepresence absorbs immediate

presence and produces distance:

Since all presence is presence only at a distance, the tele- presence of the era

of the globalization of exchanges could only be established across the widest

possible gap. This is a gap which now stretches to the other side of the world,

from one edge to the other of present reality. But this is a meta- geophysical

reality which strictly regulates the tele- continents of a virtual reality that

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monopolizes the greater part of the economic activity of the nations and, con-

versely, destroys cultures which are precisely situated in the space of the phys-

ics of the globe.86

Further, the mediated optics and tele- surveillance of The Great Game

function as a reminder that the aim of multimedia, as Virilio explains, is

“to make the computer screen the ultimate window, but a window which

would not so much allow you to receive data as to view the horizon of

globalization, the space of its accelerated virtualization” (16).

In contrast to Klima’s usual practice of constructing gamelike worlds

without actants, characters, or obstacles, the installation Fish (2001) in-

vites the viewer to play a video game from the perspective of a virtual

goldfish. The gallery notice explains the relationship between this game

and the fish tanks to which it is attached:

Visitors play a video game in which the outcome affects the fate of a real gold-

fish. A freestanding arcade cabinet is flanked by an elaborate configuration of

fish tanks that, with long plastic tubes and tiers of bowls, looks as if it could

be from the set of a 1950s science fiction movie. In the game . . . the player is a

fish swimming through dangerous waters. Lose, and a goldfish is shot from a

Fish, installation view, BitStreams exhibition, Whitney Museum of American

Art, 2001.

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bowl into a tank with menacing oscar fish, which will eat it later at night. Win,

and the goldfish heads toward less carnivorous company. Players might pity

the victim, but the goldfish must lose out sometimes, or the oscars will die of

starvation. . . . More than that, it may be the reigning moral dilemma in a zero-

sum system, where saving one creature means killing another and where one

person’s calm blue water is another’s path to power.87

Echoing Matisse’s ornate figures of goldfish, Klima denaturalizes them

by rendering them in the artificial colors and forms of video game char-

acters.88 Emily Apter similarly suggests that Klima’s work “denaturalizes

digital imaging, making the viewer hyper- conscious of the technological

mediation of the world and its images; extending the reach of environ-

mental activism and providing ecosystems access to self- representation

in a visual form other than landscape or nature pictures.”89 Klima’s eco-

systems and goldfish are indeed denaturalized, but might we not also

read these fish as ultimately naturalized, reinjected into a food chain in

which they will eventually be consumed? Fish reasserts life as a funda-

mentally biological, and not juridical or political, category. The moder-

ated death event, the moment of consumption, is almost without inter-

face. In this respect, it serves as an ultimate instance of the link between

a representational system and the real.

Fish lays bare the position of responsibility implied by The Great Game.

Moreover, it confronts the viewer with the individual decisions that are

both unavailable and obfuscated in the war game, and thus opens fur-

ther the issue of complicity. In contrast to the constricted interactivity of

Klima’s other installations, this work grants the player full responsibility

over its outcomes. To play Fish is to assume the right to kill, the sovereign

power over life and death. It is also to assume the power to determine

the value of life: should the oscar fish eat, or should the goldfish die?

While this level of control and responsibility may seem quite removed

from the inconsequential participation allowed by Klima’s other instal-

lations, none of his works escape the question of life and death. Rather,

the sovereign power over life and death particular to Fish embodies the

individual responsibility toward which the other installations can only

gesture. It thus provides a situated and local instance of a problem mani-

fest in global terms in The Great Game.

How do we access the events that lie behind statistics? How do we

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cross the impassable gulf that lies between “here” and “there”? What are

the artistic strategies befitting the foreigner’s inability to grasp the ex-

perience of atrocity “over there”? As outsiders to this experience, Susan

Sontag suggests, we need images to make the experience of war real.

“The understanding of war among people who have not experienced

war” is conditioned and constituted through images, the visual sound

bites that aid the perception and memory of war.90 “When there are pho-

tographs,” she explains, “a war becomes ‘real,’ ” in fact intensifying the

reality effect (104). We do not so much remember through photographs,

however, as remember the photographs themselves, a remembering that

eclipses other kinds of understanding (89). Indeed, the war on terror

has been fixed in the cultural imaginary by a certain tyranny of the

image: Colin Powell’s analysis of the two satellite images of the supposed

chemical bunkers; the CIA artists’ renditions of Iraq’s supposed mobile

biological weapons labs; the brutal photographs from Abu Ghraib; the

framed photographs of the corpse of Al- Zarqawi; videos of beheadings;

the shots of the mutilated bodies of the four contractors in Falluja; the

circulation of atrocity and porn images through a Web site that I likely

do not need to name.91 Judith Butler pursues the point further to note

that recognition and response depend on the photograph: “If there is no

photographic evidence, there is no atrocity.”92 In her comment on the Abu

Ghraib photographs, Butler takes issue with Sontag’s location of ideol-

ogy and subjectivity in the caption rather than the image itself. Visual

culture has a critical role to play during war, Butler argues, which “is to

thematize the forcible frame agreeably and eagerly adopted by journal-

ists and photographers who understand themselves aligned with the war

effort” (826). The visual frame— the embedded perspective— commands

and produces an interpretation, an inflection, a way of seeing; the task

of visual culture is to challenge the sense of objective immediacy that

would attempt to mask that visual framing.

Our trust in the reality and authenticity of the image has been en-

forced by what Jordan Crandall has called “transmission vérité,” wherein

the conditions of production are laid bare to the viewer. Because high

production values have become equated with staging, theatricality, and

falsity, the production of a reality effect requires the stripping away of

aspects of refinement. As Crandall explains, “The hidden substrata of

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the technology are reintroduced as part of the content of the image, and

a raw immediacy appears to open up a direct access to the real.”93 Mikes

will become visible. Handhelds and grainy shots will become common.

We will see the camera shake and hear the heavy breathing of the jour-

nalist as she runs for a shot. Rather than aestheticism, which is regarded

as a kind of subjective intervention, we will have the putative objectivity

of seemingly spontaneous, on- the- fly image capture. The irony, of course,

is that photographers and documentarians have to be even more deliber-

ate in their visual framing and use of the apparatus, but authenticity has

become that which is constructed. Images that do not make their me-

chanics known are no longer trusted. Thus, Crandall notes, “the reality

of representation is substituted for the representation of reality” (218).

In this light, Michael Takeo Magruder’s algorithmic composition

Falluja, Iraq, 31/03/2004 makes for a particularly striking intervention

(Version 1.0, October 2004; Version 2.0, June 2005).94 Working with the

sensational images of the killing of the four American contractors (mer-

cenaries) by an Iraqi mob in Falluja, Magruder renders these images as

computational processes rather than as objects. As they unfold on the

screen, the images become occluded by BBC news feeds also describ-

ing the events, text that itself becomes a kind of abstract image. In its

time- based structure, the project comments on the temporal structure

of real- time war reporting, which endeavors to collapse the temporal

and material gap between the object, the journalistic framing of the ob-

ject, and the presentation of that framing. In Magruder’s work, we are

presented not with a linear movement from event to broadcast but a “re-

flexive loop” that opens up the possibilities for alteration, for hacking the

circuit. Indeed, the audio track of Falluja, Iraq, also of news reports, is

itself marked by feedback, distortion, and dissonance. It is only slightly

outside the conceptual scope of the work, but there is a further signifi-

cance to the use of algorithmic composition as a mode of representation

of war: if war games map out rule- based scenarios and in some sense

produce the future, there is something quite suggestive about algorithms

that cannot entirely program or manage future outcomes.

Paula Levine’s Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco

Baghdad similarly departs from a single event: the first bombing cam-

paign in Iraq on March 21, 2003. Developed at the Banff Centre, Alberta

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(April–May 2004), Levine’s project is an exercise in transpositional ge-

ographies. The Shadows from Another Place series poses a fundamental

question: “What if international gestures, such as acts of terrorism or

war, were like boomerangs that returned to sites of origins with an im-

pact equal to the one enacted?” With this speculative question in mind,

San Francisco Baghdad imaginatively transposes the bomb and

missile attacks on Baghdad onto a map of San Francisco. (The audio

comprises sounds from the same attack.) Taking its cue from local jour-

nalist Herb Caen’s naming of San Francisco as “Baghdad by the Bay,”

Levine’s project gives the notion of “sister cities” an entirely different

meaning. One of the work’s central themes, then, is empathy, as it helps

viewers to imagine themselves in the position of the other. It does so by

using GPS to map the longitude and latitude of each strike on Baghdad

onto matching coordinates in San Francisco, such that a missile attack

on the Presidential Palace hits in the Castro district. Here we might also

mention Alyssa Wright’s locative project Cherry Blossoms (2006), which

follows on San Francisco Baghdad to perform a similar exercise in

transpositional geography between Baghdad and Boston.95 The Boston-

area participant dons a backpack outfitted with GPS receiver, micro-

controller, and confetti; when she walks into a space that corresponds

with the site of civilian casualties in Baghdad, her backpack releases

Michael Takeo Magruder, Falluja, Iraq, 31/03/2004, 2005.

virtual­war 101

a cloud of confetti, each piece registering and memorializing a singu-

lar death. Given their use of GPS, these projects cannot fail to invoke

the high- precision bombing afforded by weapons systems such as the

JDAM, air- to- surface smart munitions that contain GPS units reported

to be effective within nine feet with 99 percent accuracy.96

JDAM munitions and sorties provide the kind of visual spectacle on

which the MIME- Net feeds. Such is the cynical advantage of a war in

Iraq rather than Afghanistan. Kabul, according to a captain in the U.S.

Navy, was “not a target- rich environment.”97 This sentiment was echoed

or perhaps even suggested by Rumsfeld, who, according to Richard Clarke,

“complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghani-

stan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had bet-

ter targets.”98 The diffused sectarian warfare into which the occupation

of Iraq has evolved has meant that open pyrotechnic displays on the

nightly news have given way to maps recording incidents of insurgent

activity. For such a war, Tim Klimowicz’s visualization project Iraq War

Coalition Fatalities provides the perfect artistic record.

Paula Levine, Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco Baghdad, 2004.

virtual­war102

Within the minimalist, monochromatic outlines of a map of Iraq,

a time- based visualization of the location and date of U.S. and coali-

tion casualties unfolds. A Flash work, it runs at ten frames per second,

with each frame representing one day. Each death is registered first as a

white flash, then as a red dot that turns to black and fades to gray over

the course of thirty days. Each death is also keyed to a muted sound

that increases in volume relative to the number of fatalities per day, such

that its rhythmic effect is partly that of a typewriter or drumbeat. Audio

and visuals combined— the puncturing quality of the dots— suggest that

an automatic weapon is riddling the map as if it were a target that will

soon be irreparably shredded. Updated regularly with statistics from

icasualties.org and geographic data from globalsecurity.org, the project

also has a narratological component: over the course of the previous four

years, it is possible to trace waves of guerrilla attacks along major arter-

ies and in urban areas and to read the deserts as no- go zones. Klimowicz

acknowledges the limitations of these narratives, the incompleteness of

his data, and the fallacy of objective reporting. He notes that at the out-

set, his “goal [was] to encompass the entire war in a single animation,”

and ultimately he “ended up showing just a tiny sliver of the much larger

reality.”99 The scale and complexity of the war are such that a totality of

Tim Klimowicz, Iraq War Coalition Fatalities, 2003–.

virtual­war 103

representation would be impossible, and indeed numerous queries have

been posed about the decision to visualize coalition rather than Iraqi

casualties. Regardless, that “tiny sliver” manages to communicate dura-

tion, producing a kind of viewing fatigue even at the rate of two years

per minute. Overall, the project’s intervention is to counter the statisti-

cal abstraction of casualty lists, to use the data to produce competing

narratives of the war in Iraq, and to memorialize the lives lost. Within

the context of asymmetric warfare and artistic dissent, information vi-

sualization functions as a kind of weapon, one that does not necessarily

excite the passions of recruitment or work through excited, spectacular

presentation. Instead, Iraq War Coalition Fatalities is a muted use of in-

formation as a form of memorialization. It works against the spectacular

effects of virtual war and the reality effect of the image. As such, it has

behind it a pronounced ethical and political potential.

So, too, does Joseph DeLappe’s dead­ in­ Iraq, an online gaming inter-

vention in America’s Army.100 Logging into a server with the call sign

“dead- in- Iraq,” DeLappe does not enter the gameplay. Rather, he proceeds

Joseph DeLappe, dead-in-Iraq, March 2006–.

virtual­war104

to type— not paste— the name, age, service branch, and date of death of

each U.S. serviceman and woman killed in Iraq. These text messages are

directed toward other players (approximately a dozen at a time), and he

continues to enter the names of soldiers until he is killed or vote kicked,

that is, temporarily banned by the other players. His artistic object is to

list the names of each of the dead for as long as the war continues; as of

October 2007, he had input 3,582 names out of 3,829 reported dead.

As in Klimowicz’s Iraq War Coalition Fatalities, DeLappe derives the

names and other information from icasualties.org, a pragmatic choice,

but one nonetheless fraught in that the records are fundamentally com-

plete. It is not simply that the calculus is one- sided but also that the

Pentagon data is itself compromised by the exclusion of private contrac-

tors, who are counted as part of the forces in Iraq but not included among

casualty statistics. Indeed, casualty statistics are themselves the subjec-

tive if not outright fictional terrain that must be stabilized as objective

truth to claim the success of the latest surge campaign.101 Again, in my

reading, both artists, along with Klima, pragmatically accept the data

to contest its inevitable abstraction but do not have a stake in produc-

ing it as categorically true or false. Further, it must be noted that these

projects of memorialization are only materially feasible in the context of

a new warfare that has seen a radical shift in soldier- civilian casualty

ratios— now 1:8— and in this sense they have what we might regard as

manageable limits.102

Dead­ in­ Iraq is of a piece with DeLappe’s earlier project, War Poetry:

Medal of Honor, in which he entered the game space of Medal of Honor:

Allied Assault and proceeded to quote Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry: in both

DeLappe works with the theatrical and poetic aspects of text messaging

to puncture the immersive experience of gameplay with an antiwar per-

formance. In America’s Army, this puncturing is often met with protests

and outrage, such that his text messages are interspersed with expres-

sions of intense vitriol from fellow players; at times he is ignored and at

other times shot.103 Game spaces are defined by prohibitions, by what

players cannot do rather than what they can. If players were granted

an all- powerful scepter, there would be no agon, no game mechanics.

In such a media environment, social conventions and rules of decorum

are quite often more vigorously enforced. One crucial question raised by

virtual­war 105

this intervention, then, concerns the public or private nature of a game

space. America’s Army is public in the sense that it was developed with

funds from the U.S. Army, but is its game space a digital commons? Is

a server a public or a private entity? DeLappe notes that his protest is

partly directed against the game itself, which he regards, as do many,

as a taxpayer- funded recruitment tool. In this respect, dead­ in­ Iraq is

the contemporary equivalent of Vietnam- era protests outside of induc-

tion offices. It also invokes the long- term critical art practice of violating

social conventions in public spaces, as well as street- based performances

from Dada to the Happening. Regardless, DeLappe’s activities strike a

chord not because of historical precedent but because they draw on, and

make manifest, what one might identify as a new conception of privacy,

one based on private property and insularity. In other words, that the

many assaults on the Fourth Amendment have met with relatively little

public outrage tells us not that Americans no longer care about privacy

but that we understand privacy differently— as the right not to be dis-

turbed by the demands of others, whether that take the form of spam,

telemarketing calls, or game space disruptions.

The site- specific quality of dead­ in­ Iraq should be regarded as a kind

of direct engagement that we first saw with the SWARM the Minutemen

denial- of- service campaign and that we can also see in the Toywar. It

is a critical art practice that leaves the protected space of the museum

and gallery to engage “on the site of,” to transform the game space, how-

ever temporarily. There is no blood in America’s Army— the army was

intent on retaining the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s rating of

“Teen”— so dead­ in­ Iraq can be read as an intrusion of the real within

the space of fantasy gameplay.104 Moreover, it works with one of the basic

rules of America’s Army: when a player is critically wounded, he or she

does not immediately respawn but stays down until the round is reset.

In this respect, DeLappe performs a sacrifice each time he logs into the

server. Since he does not act in accordance with game mechanics, this is

at once an expression of pacifism and a conscientious objection to mili-

tary campaigns. However, since DeLappe’s sacrificial performance to

some degree nullifies the ludic component of the game space, we might

consider whether this substitutes aesthetics for play. At the conclusion

of his book Gaming, Galloway notes the tendency in the “counter gaming

virtual­war106

movement” (Jodi, Anne- Marie Schleiner, et al.) to perform this substitu-

tion, which, he argues, nullifies both the political and artistic potential

of gaming.105 Schleiner’s intervention within the game space of Counter

Strike— her Velvet Strike, shown at the Whitney biennial (2004)— is not

play per se; but it is certainly a performance of dissent, and her treat-

ment of a game space as a composition environment maintains no less

a purchase on the political than Galloway’s vision of radical games of

the future.106 That is to say, we might reassert the political significance

of aesthetic practices such as reverse engineering, the appropriation of

gaming software for critical and creative purposes. Witness Critical Art

Ensemble and Carbon Defense League’s collaborative reverse engineer-

ing of a Nintendo Game Boy for their Super Kid Fighter, a text- based

role- playing game modeled on Wilhelm Reich’s writings about children’s

sexual rights so as to ref lect critically on the false Puritanism in the

U.S. social context.107

So what links projects such as dead­ in­ Iraq and September 12, and

what can they tell us about the logic of tactical media with respect to

war? They are both to a certain extent positioned against play: the best

way to play the persuasive game September 12 is, as I have noted, not

to play; and DeLappe’s intervention, though confined, of course, to the

early rounds of the game, has the effect of disrupting, interrupting, and

thwarting play. Play, after all, is structured by rules of engagement, by

protocols. But we can push further: what we see from these two projects

is not necessarily an attempt to cease play but a kind of play against play.

Or to put this another way, they provide instances of playing to strip

play, to the extent that one can, of its militarized content. How to work

against the state’s co- opting not only of the content but also of the actual

activity of play remains itself the objective for more tactical operations.

Suffice it to say that dead­ in­ Iraq is so provocative as to necessitate

DeLappe’s reminding his commentators that his object is not only dis-

ruption but also memorialization. The dead, “have been forgotten,” he

insists, so “the piece is intended as a memorial and a protest. . . . Part of it

was thinking about the nature of what is a memorial. . . . A memorial is to

remember sacrifice and heroism and death. Why wait for when it’s [the

war] over? Why not do it now?”108 Memorials, as James E. Young has ex-

plained, become meaningful when viewers engage with them: in that the

virtual­war 107

hermeneutic, historical, and aesthetic significance of memorials is pro-

duced by the viewer’s interaction with that object, they are processual

objects.109 The process of memorialization situates events in temporal

sequence, bringing them “into some cognitive order.”110 Notwithstanding

the revivifying capacity of memory, the physical memorial is fixed and

subject to a certain stasis. On the other hand, the new media memorials

I discuss here are dynamic, both in the sense that they are continuous

performances and in the sense that they are computable. In that docu-

mentation will continue for the duration of the war, their temporality is

not that of the retrospective but that of a real- time, continuous present.

The Iraq War Coalition Fatalities project is continuous in another sense:

unlike the memorial that records the names of the dead, here the deaths

themselves generate their own memorial in that the statistics make up

the data feed that produces the work. It is precisely the aesthetics and

politics of information visualization that I move now to address in the

next chapter.

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109

Instead of creating a computer model of a market, ecosystem or

computer network, by using a small set of mathematical functions

(that capture the behavior of an idealized whole), we need to create

virtual environments in which we can unleash a population of virtual

animals and plants, buyers and sellers, or clients and servers, and

then to let these creatures interact and allow the self- organized

whole to emerge spontaneously.

—­maNuel­de­laNda

Virtual Money

Exhibit A for this chapter is Laura Kurgan’s Global Clock No. 1 (2000),

which provides a temporal interface for currency exchange rates of the

dollar, euro, and yen at the turn of the millennium.1 Using a Reuters data

feed, the clock visualizes the shifts in exchange value during the densest

five- minute periods of trading activity from the last business day of 1999

and the first of 2000. As it is with the market itself, the value of each cur-

rency is established not by reference to some entity outside the system

but only through its fluctuating relation to the others. In its foreground-

ing of “the luminous immateriality of money and its mutable media,” as

Kurgan describes it, the clock is an illustrative and literal instance of

millennial capitalism in operation.2

Millennial capitalism is one of a series of names for a new economic

and epistemological order in which money capital is said to have “reached

its ultimate dematerialization, as messages pass instantaneously from

one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former mate-

rial world.”3 With its multilingual commentary on capital as a series

of transactional messages, Global Clock establishes a direct relation

between linguistic exchange and monetary exchange. Moreover, as the

3. Speculative Capital: Black Shoals and the Visualizing of Finance

Speculative­capital110

Jenny Holzer–like scrolling text of Global Clock announces in English,

French, and German: “The universally recognized temporal grid— the

clock— to some degree literalizes this instantaneity by allowing transac-

tions to occur in a common virtual space regardless of geography.”4 The

approximate effect of the instantaneity and dematerialization of mone-

tary exchange is also produced by the compression and acceleration of

the ten minutes of trading activity. The clock, however, also serves as a

reminder of the difference between the temporal scope of the project and

the temporal scope of the user’s experience of the project, a difference

that reinstantiates geography and materiality.

Exhibit B, the primary evidence, is Lise Autogena and Joshua Port-

way’s Black Shoals: Stock Market Planetarium, which uses real- time

market data to visualize the market as an astronomic system that is both

complex and adaptive.5 In development since 1998, the project has been

installed twice: as part of the Tate Britain Art and Money Online exhibit

(2001) and at the Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center (2004), where it was

cosponsored by the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. Deriving its title from

Myron Scholes and Robert Merton’s formula for pricing derivatives, the

planetarium is an immersive virtual environment programmed with

Reuters data feeds from the FTSE 100 and CAC 40 indices, as well as

from the NASDAQ. (Because the planetarium provided real- time finan-

Laura Kurgan, Global Clock No. 1, 2000.

Speculative­capital 111

cial information, albeit in figurative form, the artists had to obtain secu-

rity clearance from all of the major stock exchanges.) The gallery instal-

lation at the Tate, with its high domed ceiling, reinforces the viewer’s

sense of smallness in relation to the simulated universe and thus intro-

duces a certain self- consciousness about his or her relation to the work.

When confronted with what is actually on display, a skyscape of finan-

cial data the scope of which one cannot cognitively grasp, one might then

experience something like the sublimity of a complex numerical sys-

tem.6 Through the homonymic play of “Scholes” and “Shoals,” however,

the project suggests the inverse: shallow shores where one can perceive,

and read, the assembled mass of four thousand stars, which in this case

were indexed to the top publicly traded companies on the London Stock

Exchange. (Due to their concern that the installation might function as

a trading hall, however, Reuters prohibited the naming of the stars in

the Tate exhibit.)

The allegory of the planetarium thus offers a kind of telescopic lens

that brings the market into view: in this regard, the project is situated on

the line between representation and information visualization. Arranged

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, Black Shoals: Stock Market Planetarium,

installation view, 2001.

Speculative­capital112

in constellations based on market sector or corporate relations, such as

the “Enron nova” or the “biotech cluster,” the stars produce light and en-

ergy in relation to trading activity: “Starbursts are generated whenever

trades for an individual company are received from the market, leading

to cascades of illumination when live news events trigger trading activ-

ity in the various clusters.”7 Enron, then, would have gone nova in the

fall of 2001. The astronomic paradigm makes such corporate implosions

all the more spectacular and also provokes more complicated questions

about referentiality. We might notice, for example, that constellations

such as the Enron cluster appear to be figurative but, like the big Dipper,

can only allude to a figure that is itself figurative, an abstraction of the

real perfectly suitable for a moment in which value is produced by ever

Black Shoals.

Speculative­capital 113

less visible processes. Enron, after all, sold not only energy itself but also

the licensing of energy, Jeffrey Skilling’s “big idea” being the transforma-

tion of energy from a material entity into a financial instrument and the

creation of a stock market for natural gas.8

To begin to understand the significance of Black Shoals, we might

first ask how its visualization of capital differs from that of Martin Wat-

ten berg’s SmartMoney Map of the Market, a visualization tool for five

hundred publicly traded companies.9 What does its modality of financial

data visualization communicate that one could not locate in Wattenberg’s

map or in a rendering of quantitative information informed by Edward

Tufte, a comparably aestheticized and interpretative display of data

along horizontal and vertical axes designed to facilitate legibility without

Black Shoals.

Speculative­capital114

sacrificing wonder? Both reflect the abstraction inherent in networked

financial exchanges, particularly in the case of derivatives. But the one-

to- one equivalences of Wattenberg’s commissioned work operate within

a modernist representational aesthetic that differs from the allegorical,

postmodernist, and critically ref lective and self- ref lexive aesthetic of

Black Shoals. Both use financial statistics to generate a design, but, as

we will see in this chapter, Black Shoals is not only an allegorical project

but also one that incorporates ALife creatures that use the energy emit-

ted by the stars to survive and grow. As Cefn Hoile, the designer of the

evolving creatures, notes, “the ecosystem in which they are embedded

implements a decentralized evolutionary algorithm, applying competi-

tive selective pressure to the population through conservation of energy.

It also couples them to a larger complex system. The opportunities in

their world derive from real time stock market information.”10 In this

respect, the project also provokes questions about the feedback circuit

that links a system to its environment.

In the translation of numerical data to figurative entity, we can locate

the signs of critical reflection. It is with the issue of critical reflection

that I want primarily to situate a difference between a visualization tool

and the work of art. In this chapter, we will see how some computa-

tional artists critique, use, and also reflect the speculative mechanism

that underlies and operates informational capitalism. Indeed, my con-

tention will be that we should think of computational artists themselves

SmartMoney,

Map of the

Market.

Speculative­capital 115

as speculators or at least as engaging with the practices of speculation.

These speculative practices include not only information visualization

but also the composition of computational and algorithmic works that

surrender some artistic control over the outcomes. What differentiates

this form of artistic speculation (i.e., intellectual examination) from that

of capitalist speculation is that these artworks are not only generative

but intellectually responsive to unrestricted capitalist circulation. Their

meditation on the abstract qualities and material consequences of fi-

nance capitalism is at once critical intervention and cultural critique. In

that these projects attempt to make the mysterious workings of financial

capitalism comprehensible to the viewer, we can also understand them

to be participating in a Deleuzian project of using the virtual to enact

the actual. That is to say, the old axioms about the material significance

of models and narrative frames apply: with critically reflective visualiza-

tion tactics, we might produce countersimulations and, as a result, new

modes of understanding the past and imagining the futures of finance

capitalism.

How is it that new media art and the critical discourse on finance

capital alike might reflect a plurality of possible futures, an openness to

the unexpected and to social change? Both discourses or fields have had

practical and theoretical recourse to the principle of complexity. Cellular

automata and self- organizing systems hold a certain fascination for data

visualization artists in particular and allow them to imagine data sys-

tems that are truly dynamic: the algorithmically generated forms of

Casey Reas would be one example.11 Likewise, economists and political

scientists might equate the movements of financial markets to emergent

behaviors or, like Manuel De Landa, call for the development of new eco-

nomic paradigms informed by theories of self- organization so as to think

more productively about social change.12 The point of correspondence

between the two discourses is that of agency: just as it can be said that

“there is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire market,”

so, too, can it be said that the work of new media art is to some degree

autogenerative, with control and performance no longer the exclusive

provenance of producer and user. Instead of a programmed system with

a centered, controlling agency, we have a programmable system with

spontaneous interactions among users and machines, clients and servers.

Speculative­capital116

Another point of correspondence between the two discourses, therefore,

is the distributed network as both literal entity and organizational model.

It is not simply that there are correlations between neoliberal globaliza-

tion and new media art, or that the one provides the context, the tools,

and the need for the other, but that the writers and artists considered in

this chapter present a critique of informational capitalism, even as they

are caught up within its very logic.

New media art that represents or otherwise addresses the actual op-

erations of financial markets requires a certain economic literacy from

its audience. Indeed, much of what follows in this chapter— the eviden-

tiary presentation— will be precisely the kind of historiographic and

critical labor these works demand. Their work is not only reflective but

also educative. When viewed as a “mere” planetarium, a visual spec-

tacle, as Julian Stallabrass notes, Black Shoals might risk “participat-

ing in the regular run of art- world entertainment, comprising works

that ‘raise’ issues without ever saying much interesting about them.” But

Black Shoals, along with John Klima’s ecosystm, Kurgan’s clock, and

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Synthia, demand that we engage with the in-

tricacies of capital. They gesture in two directions: toward making mar-

kets as complex systems legible and within our reach and toward the

impossibility of our ever being able to perceive and manage the totality

of these complex systems.

Can the new media art projects concerned with finance capital go

further and actually disrupt the imposing of the structure of capital on

the world? I say disrupt rather than defeat because the question need

not depend on a particular understanding of capital either as inventive,

fluid, and adaptive, as Deleuze would have it, or as inherently reactive

to the contrasting power of the multitude, as Hardt and Negri suggest.13

One possibly attainable endgame, that is, would not be to destroy capi-

tal but to disrupt or obstruct its progress. We might say, then, that art-

ists who visualize financial data are particularly well positioned to, so

to speak, beat capital at its own game, which would require anticipating

and “decoding its flows.”14 As with Klima’s work, the aesthetic of Black

Shoals and related financial visualization projects must be under stood

to be grounded in the material realities of global capitalism. In his study

of contemporary art and money, Olav Velthuis has coined the phrase

“imaginary economics” to speak of the communication of alternative eco-

Speculative­capital 117

nomic knowledge via the visual arts. Imaginary economics “goes beyond

observation and description,” he explains. “It sooner opts for a strategy

of imitation, simulation, magnification and parody.”15 It is in these terms

that we can understand Black Shoals and the other visualizations of fi-

nance: the work their art performs is perhaps less disruptive and inter-

ruptive than it is interpretative, but we can understand that interpreta-

tive gesture as itself a kind of interruption. Their allegorical renderings of

finance capital offer us a different set of narratives and para digms with

which to see the present and imagine alternative futures.

Ecosystems

John Klima is most widely known for two works, The Great Game, which

I addressed in chapter 2, and ecosystm. Commissioned by Zurich Capital

Markets, New York, exhibited in the Whitney Museum, and reviewed in

Business Week and Forbes, this large- scale and site- specific work gener-

ates a simulated ecosystem out of real- time global market data. In this

respect, it gives capital a graphic quality and renders money as an aes-

thetic object. Ecosystm’s display consists of virtual birdlike creatures

whose movement occurs in relation to the value of different currencies,

and the work includes a joystick that allows the viewer to navigate the

environment, its terrain dotted with trees representing global stock

market indexes.16 The real- time currency data that animates the flocks

of birds comes from the CNN Web site, rendering a continuous visual

picture of global capitalism. Klima describes the ongoing evolution of

the quasi- biological financial system:

In ecosystm, daily volatility determines the territory the flock occupies. If a

currency is stable, the flock has an expansive territory and can fly throughout

it in a graceful manner. If, however, the currency is volatile, the flock becomes

very “excited”, and their available territory is considerably reduced in size. . . .

If the daily volatility exceeds twice the yearly volatility, the flock is “hungry”

and it “feeds” on its country’s leading market index (as represented by the

trees). If the daily volatility exceeds three times the yearly, the flock becomes

“aggressive” and attacks a neighboring flock.17

This is digital Darwinism at work: in this ecosystem, which is at once

ecological and economic, the strongest and most stable flocks survive

and expand, as does their food supply (the trees as leading market

Speculative­capital118

index). With a suggestion, too, of ALife and self- evolution, Klima’s work

is situ ated within a discourse linking economics and biology.18 In the

ecosystm environment, “strong” trees and stable, if not expansive, ter-

ritorial boundaries suggest economic power. A stable currency allows for

the imperial expansion of the birds; stability is the condition of possibil-

ity for the movement of one national economic system into the territory

of another. In that the flocks of birds— embodying national currencies—

have no fixed ties to the landscape, the ecosystm environment can be

read as an implicit challenge to the spatializing of money described and

predicted by optimum currency area (OCA) theory, the predominant

economic paradigm used to consider monetary geography.19 Moreover,

ecosystm suggests a species body whose regime and mechanism of con-

trol are not individuating discipline but a biopolitics of the population.

To follow the paradigms of power charted by Foucault, power over life

assumes two forms: bodies are disciplined through institutions, and

populations are regulated through mechanisms such as public health

initiatives, migration patterns, and housing. In this context, the popula-

tion of virtual creatures is regulated through the global financial mar-

ket, as, by implication, are we.

As an additional design and conceptual element, Klima introduces

real- time weather data from JFK airport into this ecosystem. As he

notes, “runway visibility and cloud cover directly affect visibility and

cloud layering in ecosystm.”20 The use of weather data effectively brings

the quasi biological back into the realm of the socioeconomic. As eco­

systm suggests, it is not optimum environmental conditions that allow

the flocks, or currencies, to thrive and grow. Rather, optimum conditions

for growth are attributable to the market and the supranational organi-

zations and institutions of the nation- state that assist its functioning.

As Hardt and Negri note of the transition from the disciplinary to the

control society, “new” imperial command is exercised through political

institutions and juridical apparatuses whose objective is essentially the

maintenance of global order, that is, a stable and universal peace that

allows the normal functioning of the market economy.

ALife research is another general context for the ecosystm project.

The behavior of Klima’s creatures, however, is neither self- stabilizing nor

emergent. Rather, the virtual creatures are entirely responsive to speci-

Speculative­capital 119

fied data streams, the currency data with which they are associated (one

implication is that life itself might be conceived as a set of responsive

processes). Ecosystm, then, is composed not of quasi- intelligent, sen-

tient, or animate agents but of animated agents programmed to operate

within a delimited environment, the area of much current applied and

original ALife research. (Creatures and Tierra are among the better-

known examples.) ALife ecosystems, however, have a kind of naturalistic

impulse, an ideology that Klima consciously refuses. This would compli-

cate Emily Apter’s reading of his media environments as predicated on

the transformation of “raw digital processes” into “naturalist imagery.”21

Although his forms look organic, and the depth perspective of his land-

scape suggests a horizon, the intensified pastel hues are those of a gaming

John Klima, ecosystm, 2001. Courtesy of Zurich Capital Markets.

Speculative­capital120

environment rather than of a landscape painting. Indeed, the creatures

look vaguely militaristic at different moments in their life span. These

landscapes, then, are artificial and mathematical rather than ecologi-

cal. That Klima refuses the naturalistic is evident even from the title,

which orthographically separates the mediated, constructed “ecosystm”

from the naturalized, organic ecosystem. There is an organicism to the

piece, which is highlighted in the Business Week review of its theme of

“economic Darwinism,” yet the virtual birds, generated as they are by

the algorithm used for the bird imagery in the movie Jurassic Park, are

apposite figures for a mediated system.22 Further, Klima engages with

the ideological naturalization of money both latent and manifest within

the tradition of the “design” of financial environments (which integrates

architecture and landscape architecture), yet he refuses this motivated

connection of money and natural ecology.23

This is an ecosystem, too, on which the sun never sets. That is, eco­

systm adheres to the dominant temporal schema now: the time of the

global markets. As Virilio notes, the phenomena of telecommunications,

tele surveillance, and telepresence all contribute to a “temporal compres-

sion,” the loss of temporal and time intervals. In their place, we negoti-

ate an alternative temporal structure: world time. “With this false day,

produced by the illumination of telecommunications, an artificial sun

rises, an emergency lighting system which ushers in a new time: world

time, in which the simultaneity of actions should soon gain precedence

over their successive character.”24 The colors of ecosystm are those of the

artificial sun that perpetually illuminate the landscape. The flocks may

indeed become so volatile as to contribute to their own extinction, but

the global market itself never experiences a systems crash. Its temporal

structure is singular, homogeneous, and unified, its unity formed from

the integration of all other kinds of time.25 The display screen used in the

Whitney was eight feet square, heightening the effect of immersive en-

closure and visually suggesting not only an all- encompassing world time

but also the absence of an externality to capital, an outside where labor

power is situated. Articulating the idea that there is no outside to capital

is one of the hallmarks of the contemporary discourse on globalization,

as is manifest in Hardt and Negri’s Empire: “There is nothing, no ‘naked

Speculative­capital 121

life,’ no external standpoint, that can be posed outside this field perme-

ated by money; nothing escapes money.”26

In this respect as well, ecosystm offers a fitting visual representation

of f inance capital after Bretton Woods. Rather than molded curren-

cies analogically tied to a standard, we have what Deleuze, again in his

commentary on the control society, describes as modulation, “floating

exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample per-

centages for various currencies.”27 The universal market system does

not achieve equilibrium but accomplishes its obverse, metastability.28

Indeed, the use of weather data as a stabilizing element serves as a re-

minder of the absent currency standard. But the mobility in this work is

not only that of the continually modulated exchange rate but also that

of capital. In this sense, its allegory encompasses what Fredric Jameson

terms “free- f loating capital, in its frantic search for more prof itable

investments.”29 Giovanni Arrighi, too, notes that the decoupling of the

dollar from the gold standard and the increased mobility of capital cor-

relate: the “tendency since 1970 has been towards greater geographical

mobility of capital.”30 This is a mediated visual representation of na-

tional economies disturbed out of their “stationary state” and set into

constant motion: volatility, instability, growth, and destruction are all

coexistent and simultaneous.31 Moreover, the project provides an image

of the plasticity and dynamic aspects of capital and captures the essence

of money as Georg Simmel would describe it: “When money stands still,

it is no longer money according to its specific value and significance. The

effect that it occasionally exerts in a state of repose arises out of an an-

ticipation of its further motion. Money is nothing but the vehicle for a

movement in which everything else that is not in motion is completely

extinguished.”32 With its paradigms of growth, mutation, and hyper-

mobility, ecosystm provides a visual image of the plasticity of capital,

noted by Arrighi, working from the hermeneutic framework of Fernand

Braudel as he analyzes the “long twentieth century” as a particular stage

of capitalist history: “The essential feature of historical capitalism over

its longue durée— that is, over its entire lifetime— has been the ‘flexibil-

ity’ and ‘eclecticism’ of capital rather than the concrete forms assumed

by the latter at different places and at different times.”33

Speculative­capital122

This fundamental logic of finance capital has a precursor in Gertrude

Stein’s oft- quoted axiom on the durability and perpetuity of money—

“The money is always there but the pockets change”— a sentiment ac-

cepted as axiomatic even now. It is not just the pockets that change,

however, but also the form, matter, and function of capital, as well as

its mode of circulation. On this point, the contemporary CEO- turned-

financial- guru Walter Wriston suggests that the virtual and immediate

changing of pockets in the late twentieth century constitutes a theoreti-

cal, essential, and ontological difference, such that money is in fact still

here but now has a qualitatively different power of mutability: “The in-

creased volition of money gives you a difference in kind— not just de-

gree. It’s like a piece of lead: you put it on your desk, it’s a paperweight;

put it in a gun, it’s a bullet.”34 Although it is not my primary concern

here, more substantive academic commentary on the range and targets

of these guns is required— on the damage inflicted on “human material”

by the mechanisms of production— and this is largely the province of an

article by Jerry Harris, who, in the context of an exposé of the opera-

tions of informational capitalism, as well as of its comparatively under-

documented material consequences and abuses, hits upon a particularly

apt metaphor for the regenerative operation of capital: “Like a man in

a sinking ship looking for a way out, capitalism found in information

technology a life boat to a new world of profits.”35 It would indeed be

a ship seeking passage to a “new world of profits,” suggestive as it is of

other inaugural moments of Empire and world economy. On the issue

of material consequences, I will give Sean Cubitt the final word. His ar-

ticle is roughly coterminous with Harris’s and in spite of its presentist

rhetoric remains equally pertinent now: “Today we treat the El Niños of

uncontrolled speculative capital as just such forces of nature, out of the

reach of human command, and mistake global injustice for the neces-

sary nature of global communication. However, it is precisely those who

are marginalized and excluded from the immateriality of the informa-

tion economy who are its final referent, its final content, and its final

mediation.”36

One such discursive feature is the dialectic between materiality and

immateriality with particular regard to capital: informational capital-

ism, as it is articulated in the discourse on Empire, globalization, and

Speculative­capital 123

global capital, has produced a certain abstraction. Capital has detached

from a concrete, material context and become speculative.37 Symbolic

goods and services have qualitatively superseded material goods. Since

the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the decoupling of the

dollar from the gold standard, currency no longer circulates with a solid

material basis. The referent has been evacuated, the sign now wholly

self- referential and circulating in the order of the hyperreal. As Jameson

notes of the new economic and epistemological order, “globalization is

rather a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ul-

timate dematerialization, as messages that pass instantaneously from

one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material

world.”38 (We might think of globally networked financial telecommu-

nications systems such as SWIFT as an example of capital as a series

of transactional messages.) Imperial territory has also been dematerial-

ized and overcoded by the circuits of Empire.39 While still conceived in

terms of embeddedness, the global city nevertheless also commands a

global city function, as the industrial and regional industrial complexes

have been replaced by network transactions and “multiple specialized

circuits.”40

In contrast to the many and varied readings of finance capital as non-

concrete, if not immaterial, the photo- essayist Allan Sekula insists on

the materiality of the movement of goods, labor, and bodies in his ar-

tistic project, which is to represent the “imaginary and material geog-

raphies of the advanced capitalist world.”41 Particularly in the series of

photographic works focused on the maritime industry, Sekula captures

the messy and analog component of finance capitalism: “If the stock

market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the

harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk.”42 He writes

also of the “slow movement of heavy and necessary things,” the “concrete

movement of goods,” and a “certain stubborn and pessimistic insistence

on the primacy of material forces.”43 Very much in sympathy with this

position, Zillah Eisenstein juxtaposes the “REAL of hauling water” with

the putative immateriality of the flows of cyber- media capital.44 And in

her reading of the “global city,” Saskia Sassen similarly comments on the

“embeddedness” of place: “Capital even if dematerialized is not simply

hypermobile or that trade and investment and information flows are not

Speculative­capital124

only about flows.”45 In their summary review of this very problematic,

Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift read information technology and tele-

matics spaces such as the City of London not as abstract and inhuman

but as precisely the reverse: information spaces that are distinctly so-

cial and comprised of actor networks.46 Capital may be speculative, they

argue, but neither the social nor the human can be thought as dematerial-

ized. Leyshon and Thrift write, further, of the idea that “money is itself a

geography,” more broadly on the spatial distribution and construction of

monetary economies (3). Within the context of these new “geographies

of money,” whereby space- time relations are reconfigured, Klima’s eco-

system virtually evacuates geophysical space and operates at the level of

the meta- geophysical, the virtual environment superseding that of the

cartographic and the planetary. His mapping projects and financial eco-

systems alike are postgeographic, demarcated not by continents but by

“tele- continents.”47 Yet the work paradoxically insists on the materiality

and material effects of capital and currency.48 Ecosystm thus establishes

an explicit relation between the abstraction of currency markets and the

material consequences of finance capital.

Given the importance of the viewer to ecosystm and indeed to much

of Klima’s work, a full analysis of its commentary on the materiality of

capital should require a site analysis to engage the work and to see how

users engage with it. In July 2005 I tried for the last time to enter the

lobby of Zurich Capital Markets in New York, in its new headquarters in

Washington Square. Zurich Capital Markets, we might remember, com-

missioned the work in what was a fairly ordinary acquisition of symbolic

capital, all the richer, perhaps, for having linked its brand to that of the

Whitney. Here, I thought, I would be able to see the installation in its

designated site, with an audience not of gallery visitors but of financial

workers. After a polite yet heated encounter with the security guards

in the lobby— a civil affair of the kind one has with petty officers of the

new security state in airports, transport stations, and offices around the

United States— I was refused entry. The building and its contents are

no longer open to the public, a sign of national security in its privatized

form. From this anecdote, we might conclude that Klima’s ecosystm is

situated at a certain moment in the history of finance capitalism. While

only recently offering a consuming public a visualization of the power of

Speculative­capital 125

financial markets, its inaccessibility at present manifests the forces of

privatization and security.

Bionomics

This section takes its cue from a plant, more specifically, from a Yucca

plant. Even more specifically, it takes its cue from a Yucca plant con-

nected by electrodes to a computer and fed a strict diet of stock mar-

ket pricing data. Exhibited as part of the “Best Before” show at Tensta

Konsthall in Stockholm, Ola Pehrson’s Yucca Invest Trading Plant

(1999) provided a paradigmatic instance of irrational exuberance at the

peak of the millennial dot- com market.49 The wired plant was set atop

a worktable in the gallery, the electric impulses it emitted translated

into purchase or sell orders and its successes rewarded with sunlight

and water. Currents then become currency: if the plant says buy Enron

at $90, one buys. This is at one level a characteristic representation of

investment decisions as imbued with a kind of divination, lacking the

historicity of the I Ching or astrology but nonetheless operating with

the same principles of chance, intuition, and the mystical hidden hand.

In this respect, the trading plant figures the market “as the nervous and

irrational system that it is, in which every decision is dependent on gut

feeling as on intellectual and technical calculations.”50 The plant also

links organism and market in a symbiotic embrace, as its investment de-

cisions have material consequences for its own welfare. If Enron starts

to dip and profits evaporate, water and light are withheld, the effects of a

market decline materializing in wilting or yellowing leaves. The trading

plant is thus self- generating, wired into a feedback loop with the mar-

ket and situating organism and market under the paradigm of growth.

Pehrson’s plant will be the illustrative figure for this component of my

analysis, which focuses on the naturalizing of markets as ecosystems

such as we see in Black Shoals and Klima’s ecosystm. To understand fully

the significance, the critical importance, and the disruptive effect of the

ALife creatures in Black Shoals, as well as the project’s treatment of the

feedback loop that links system and environment, we need to delve more

deeply into the long- term discourse on the market as self- regulating and

homeostatic.

Speculative­capital126

The Black- Scholes formula (also known as option pricing theory and

derivatives pricing theory) owes a certain debt to Louis Bachelier, who,

even before Einstein, was the first to model Brownian motion in the

fluctuations of financial markets. Bachelier’s important thesis, “Theory

of Speculation” (1900), contributed to the random- walk hypothesis, the

notion that changes in stock prices could best be understood in terms of

random movements.51 Popular studies of finance leading up to the 1929

crash often tended to appraise the market as somewhat predictable given

proper techniques and careful study— as befits the moment of the “com-

mon investor,” which saw a flood of titles instructing readers in the “art”

and “technique” of speculation.52 But the notion that one could apply

advanced mathematics to finance also gave rise to equilibrium theories

of mathematical finance, which hold that risk and return are related to

each other. As M. M. Osborne notes in a 1958 paper, “Brownian Motion

in the Stock Market”: “Common- stock prices, and the value of money

can be regarded as an ensemble of decisions in statistical equilibrium,

with properties quite analogous to an ensemble of particles in statisti-

cal mechanics.”53 For the purposes of my discussion, the introduction to

Paul H. Cootner’s edited volume The Random Character of Stock Market

Prices, which brings together the work of Bachelier, Osborne, and other

literature on efficient markets and the efficient- market hypothesis, is par-

ticularly instructive. Here Andrew Lo speaks to the different theoretical

models for the financial markets: “One of the most promising directions

is to view financial markets from a biological perspective and, specifi-

cally, within an evolutionary framework in which markets, instruments,

Ola Pehrson, Yucca Invest

Trading Plant, 1999.

Speculative­capital 127

institutions and investors interact and evolve dynamically according to

the ‘law’ of economic selection.”54 How this “biological perspective” plays

out in the discourse on speculative capital is my particular concern.

Arrighi’s analysis of finance capital holds it to be fundamentally cy-

clical and, as such, “a recurrent phenomenon which has marked the

capitalist era from its earliest beginnings in late medieval and early

modern Europe.”55 The moment when capital takes flight from produc-

tion and becomes speculative constitutes its third and final stage. This

last and highest stage is recurrent, and the long twentieth century— the

title of Arrighi’s study— is just one of four systemic cycles of accumula-

tion that he identifies within capital’s life span.56 So it is that we have

the basic operational logic of capital for Arrighi: regeneration, a thesis

that comes from his exegesis of Marx. According to Marx’s formula for

capital, value had an “occult” power of self- and automatic expansion,

that of being able to augment or “add value to itself.” Such a quality of

self- reproduction would, in the mid- nineteenth century, almost neces-

sarily be described in quasi- biological terms: so, value “brings forth liv-

ing offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs” and operates in the guise,

mode, and form of money so as to bring about “its own spontaneous

generation.”57 Marx suggests that value, while always linked to mate-

rial labor, nonetheless postures as capital and commodity and implicitly

emerges as autogenerative and “self- multiplying,” as that which lays its

own golden eggs.58 Jameson’s amplification of the third stage of Marx’s

formula, C- M, extends these animal metaphors. In his commentary on

the passage from commodity- form to money- form— “it must spend some

time as a cocoon before it can take off as a butterfly”— and on Arrighi’s

own exegesis of this stage, Jameson notes: “Capital itself becomes free-

floating. It separates from the concrete context of its productive geogra-

phy. . . . Now, like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis, it separates

itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight.”59

These biological metaphors for the evolutionary movements of capi-

tal are appropriately creative in their vision of birth via metamorpho-

sis and the shedding of a decayed structure, echoing as it does Joseph

Schumpeter’s famous theory of the birth, regeneration, and essential truth

of capital, that of “creative destruction.”60 In concrete terms, creative

Speculative­capital128

destruction suggests the dislodging of one product or process by another,

such as the replacement of mimeograph machines by photocopiers. For

Schumpeter, capital operates according to a biological process of “in-

dustrial mutation,” whereby the economic structure “incessantly revolu-

tionizes . . . from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly

creating a new one.”61 But what exactly is the relation between revolu-

tion and a biological paradigm? Schumpeter’s formulation suggests that

a certain degree of destruction is inherent to any systemic change and

that there can be no change without energy, but situating capital within

a biological paradigm allows him also to speculate both on genesis and

its corollary, termination or degeneration. It places him within a dialec-

tical model of growth and decline.62 Linking capital to organic matter

lends it continuity and coherence on a path from genesis to decay and

eventual death. It further suggests a process of self- reproduction, with

capital giving birth to its own offspring, laying its own golden eggs, or

decomposing and reorganizing its own larval tissues.

Such a vision of autogeneration reaches an apotheosis in Marx’s figural

reading of commodities and money’s power both of accrual and origina-

tion, which is part of the same general formula for capital. “However

scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell,” he writes, com-

modities “are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews,

and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make

new money.”63 This is of course value’s “occult” power: literally hidden,

concealed, and secret. Circumcision here may serve as an identificatory

marker, but an inward circumcision is also suggestive of Schumpeter’s

mutation “from within.” By implying that the potential for procreation

lies almost exclusively within the system, Marx suggests that capital has

the capacity, perhaps the genetic material, both to reproduce and to de-

stroy itself.64

In chapter 1, I introduced the tension between a territorial and a capi-

talist logic of power, which we can see in the discourse on finance capital

as well. As a strong reminder of the continued material force of imperial

and territorial power, for example, Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver

ask whether the “phoenix of high finance” will be able to “rule the roost

without the support of strong states more effectively than it has in the

Speculative­capital 129

past.”65 Mixed avian metaphor notwithstanding, the use of the phoenix

as figure is significant because finance capital is continually imagined as

emerging in a new form from the ashes, shell, structure, or chrysalis of

the old. It is these properties of malleability, mutation, and adaptation

that will lead Jameson to link capital to a virus in his reading of Arrighi,

wherein he describes the movements of late capitalism in similar terms,

with metaphors drawn from biology and genetics: “The system is bet-

ter seen as a kind of virus (not Arrighi’s figure), and its development is

something like an epidemic (better still, a rash of epidemics, an epi-

demic of epidemics).”66 In the displacement of capital onto a battle of

viruses, or their exponential magnification as epidemic, or better still, a

plague, there is an attendant promise that capitalism might indeed carry

a fatal disease and bear within itself the elements of its own destruction.

Michael Pryke and George Allen articulate the potential for disruption

in similar terms: monetized time- space is that “through which ‘infec-

tions’ may pass simultaneously.”67 Indeed, the promise of a future vac-

cination against this infectious disease and the very idea of biological

mechanisms of self- protection and self- preservation serve as a screen

for the whole repertoire of tactics Armand Mattelart and others have

in mind when they speak of resistance to the forces of global media and

capital. But as Hardt and Negri suggest via their commentary on the

viral spread and regeneration of the imperial order, not only is vacci-

nating against the global network of capital impossible, but transmittal

and contamination are inevitable: “The age of globalization is the age of

universal contagion,” they note, and the Empire is formed partly “on the

basis of its capacity to develop itself more deeply, to be reborn, and to

extend itself throughout the biopolitical latticework of world society.”68

This is the terrain of Michael Rothschild’s Bionomics, which, as its

subtitle, “The Inevitability of Capitalism,” suggests, has a certain invest-

ment in figuring the financial markets as self- regulating rather than

requiring state control. As my discussion so far indicates, Rothschild’s

study of economics in relation to ecosystems is part of a broader dis-

course linking corporations and capitalist economies to biological enti-

ties and naturalizing financial markets: “Capitalism flourishes wherever

it is not suppressed, because it is a naturally occurring phenomenon,”

Speculative­capital130

he notes. It is “the inevitable, natural state of human economic affairs.”69

(In deed, even De Landa observes that “markets are quite similar to eco-

systems in many respects.”)70 Situating information, broadly conceived,

as the core unit of complex capitalist and ecosystems and arguing

that evolution is the engine driving both biological and economic life,

Rothschild develops an extended analogy that suggests that capital-

ism and the market economy spontaneously emerged at one moment in

history and have since been perpetually mutating and self- organizing.

The notion that organisms and organizations alike maintain complex

internal hierarchies and therefore run themselves legitimates his free-

market, anti- regulation stance. In other words, if markets, corporations,

and financial systems are complex biological entities (or evolved artificial

systems) and thereby internally self- regulating— that is, if “a flexible eco-

nomic order emerges spontaneously from the chaos of free markets”—

then it follows that external rules and regulations are superfluous. The

internally self- regulating mechanism is not the genes but “accumulated

technical knowledge.”71 In the principles of self- organization in biologi-

cal systems, free- market ideologists have found their ideal model.

The limitations of organic metaphors within economic discourse have

been identified by J. K. Gibson- Graham, who focuses on the represen-

tation of the economy as an organic body. In a collaborative study of

capitalism “as we know it,” Gibson- Graham (Katherine Gibson and Julie

Graham writing in one voice) critiques the dominant articulation of

capitalism within the Marxian tradition as unified, singular, and total-

izing.72 This tendency to read capitalism as a unified, self- reproducing

organism is manifest, Gibson- Graham suggests, in the physiological

metaphors used to characterize the economy.73 Such a reading, in her

view, fails to account for capitalism as a “disaggregated and diverse set

of practices unevenly distributed across a varied economic landscape.”74

Reconceptualizing capitalism in terms of heterogeneity, fragmentation,

and permeability, rather than organic unity, requires that we recognize

noncapitalist economic practices, and it also allows for a more widely

integrative notion of revolutionary praxis. Such is it the case, then, that

Otto Imken would provide this vision of the structures of financial mar-

kets, which maintains a similar insistence on multiplicity rather than

singularity:

Speculative­capital 131

The market has been fetishised by equilibrium- seeking, neo- classical econo-

mists as the magical balance sheet which automatically equalizes supply and

demand, while the anti- market has been simplified as the authoritarian power

of the monarch or elites dictating orders. Instead, the market and anti- market

should be seen as multiplicities, as complex, non- linear dynamics in which real

processes interact and are shaped, coerced and enabled by their either smooth

or striated environment; together composing an environment which is never

fully one type or the other, which is always changing itself.75

Why else should we be seeking new economic models, as Gibson-

Graham, De Landa, and Imken all suggest? For this we can turn to

Mark C. Taylor, whose analysis of Long- Term Capital Management will

be important in a later section. At the close of Confidence Games: Money

and Markets in a World without Redemption, Taylor notes: “If we have

learned anything from the economic crises of the late 1990s, it is that

models matter. When the models informing policies and guiding strate-

gies are at odds with new emerging realities, the consequences can be

devastating.”76

To understand further why economic models matter, one need only

consider the intimate connections between neoliberal market ideology

and social Darwinism: both have their roots in Adam Smith, and the pe-

culiar brand of conservatism each espouses not only values the individ-

ual over the community but adamantly opposes the idea of revo lutionary

practice as a means of producing social change. In a mid century analy-

sis that remains strikingly relevant, Social Darwinism in American

Thought, Richard Hofstadter is concerned to show why Darwin ian poli-

cies in the social sphere were tremendously popular in the early twenti-

eth century.77 In the decades before the Great Depression, the popularity

and influence of eugenics coincided with the increasing number of immi-

grants and racial minorities in the United States. The culture school of

William James and John Dewey led to certain changes in that there was

a growing institutional investment in the study of the cultural and en-

vironmental, rather than the biological, conditions that shaped an indi-

vidual. However, in our current moment of creationist assault on school

curricula, there is a substantive disconnect between the biological and

the social: the very politicians and right- wing public intellectuals who

offer up creationism and intelligent design as “alternatives” to scientific

Speculative­capital132

Darwinism are simultaneously offering us social Darwinism as a legiti-

mating narrative for neoliberal politics. No need even to give lip service

to the welfare state any longer: if the poor cannot lift themselves up out

of poverty, then of course it is merely natural selection and the survival of

the fittest at work, natural laws that government cannot purport to con-

travene. And if we do not need regulation of either financial markets or

the information society— because these entities are self- regulating and

self- modifying— then we certainly do not need to regulate the environ-

ment either, which, after all, is a natural system. Finally, if the income

gap between the rich and the poor grows wider and the Faustian pact

made by the neoconservatives and fundamentalist Christians intensifies

global political and religious conflicts, then all we are able to do is just

let it be. The idea of revolutionary structural transformation, after all,

is anathema to an ideology that holds that competition between races,

societies, and species is a natural, organic process and that social hierar-

chies are genetically predetermined.

The Age of Electronic Networks

The war on terror, and the war on terrorist finance, has brought the op-

eration of networks such as CHIPS under the purview of the National

Security Agency (NSA) and into public view. CHIPS is a private- sector

clearinghouse and money- movement system that handles over 242,000

bank- to- bank transactions and business payments per day, which corre-

lates to an average daily circulation of $1.2 trillion.78 An electronic sys-

tem that purports to handle over 95 percent of all global dollar payments

must necessarily turn for its administration to software specialists, pro-

grammers, and systems analysts, but in some respects the system au-

thenticates, regulates, and generates itself. It does so partly by assigning

every participant a net position of debit or credit at the end of the day

so as to stabilize the instantaneous movement of stateless money. (The

CHIPS system assigns each participant a universal identification num-

ber [UID] that tracks account and bank information.) The system also

operates as an information database that helps to set monetary value

and coordinates the very financial transactions that it needs to operate.

As the latest NSA controversy has informed us, the worldwide finan-

Speculative­capital 133

cial telecommunications system called SWIFT (Society for Worldwide

Interbank Financial Telecommunication) functions alongside CHIPS

by standardizing and facilitating the automation of payment messages

between networked banks. Access to the transaction database would os-

tensibly allow the Treasury Department and the CIA to track the fund-

ing of terrorist cells; it is clear, then, why these networks are primary

targets in the war on terrorist finance.79 The sensation surrounding the

Los Angeles Times and New York Times stories of June 2006 reminds

us of the extent to which these networks are meant to be both invisible

and self- regulating. That is, everyday life does not require our under-

standing them. Both systems regulate transactions, financial data, and

themselves; both are purely instrumental and commodifiable.80 As is the

case for Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, nei-

ther can account for either the creation or the significance of financial

information. Both are in a sense meaningless; rather, their function and

performance are their meaning.

We might move from this specific instance of economic self- regulation

and self- governance to more general conceptions of the operational prin-

ciples of the global financial markets. Pryke and Allen draw on Georg

Simmel’s philosophy of money in their analysis of derivatives, the merger

of technology and money, speed, and the new forms of money after

Bretton Woods, and they suggest that money “has made itself adapt-

able to a new set of circumstances and, in so doing, seeks to ‘impose its

rhythm and pace’ on the contents and co- ordinates of life.”81 Strongly

echoing Lyotard’s commentary on the status of truth and knowledge

in a postmodern moment, Jean- Marie Guéhenno further argues that

functionality constitutes the significance and structure of the principal

financial markets, which lack a “clear architecture,” generally lack a “ter-

ritorial logic,” and are, as he notes, “increasingly defined by the rules by

which they run themselves.”82 Such operationalism is precisely the mode

of the network: an autotelic, autogenerative, and autodidactic “smart”

system that drives the global economy and provides its most appropriate

figure.83

Informational capitalism, we might thus conclude, mutates not as an

unavoidably communicable virus but as a nonorganic entity whose opera-

tive criterion is performativity. Lyotard notes that the computer “could

Speculative­capital134

become the ‘dream’ instrument for controlling and regulating the mar-

ket system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclu-

sively by the performativity principle. In that case, it would inevitably

involve the use of terror.”84 The electronic network operates according

to the Lyotardian technological performative in that its very nature and

truth are constituted by its performance and efficiency.85 The networked

structure of information and technologies exists in the moment of “the

great unknown,” Arrighi and Silver suggest, and is differentiated and

defined by its rules of operation. It has its own operating force, and thus

Lyotard’s conception of terror is also a necessary component: the func-

tion is that which rules the waves. The general belief at the end of the

long twentieth century is that capital itself is given to mutation and flexi-

bility, not to self- destruction but to autotelic reproduction and regenera-

tion. This is the mode of the network, which is forced to function or else

risk being destroyed. It must perform, not optimally or creatively, but

basically. A complex, adaptive network, moreover, retains an inherent

plasticity and carries along with it the power to reconstitute itself.

That my own rhetoric in the preceding paragraphs should seem gen-

eral, that it should eschew the intricacy and specificity of Paul Baran’s

important research on centralized, decentralized, and distributed net-

works— and the contemporary discourse on Baran and related Rand

research— for the metaphoric and singular network, is conscious.86 It

offers an apposite parallel with the dominant ideology of “cyberspace”

in the mid- 1990s: digital Darwinism, whether it be manifest as Kevin

Kelly’s “cyberevolutionism,” the figuring of the Internet as a self- evolving,

natural system, or Nicholas Negroponte’s commentary on the Internet

as an “example of something that has evolved with no apparent designer

in charge, keeping its shape very much like the formation of a flock of

ducks.”87 Digital Darwinism is of a piece with the treatment of the mar-

ket as an ecosystem: if one conceives of the Internet as an organic entity,

one that can regulate itself, then there is no need for government regu-

lation and intervention. In other words, as is manifest in Kevin Kelly’s

cyberlibertarian treatise, these metaphors are far from disinterested, as

many critics have demonstrated. For Kevin Robins and Frank Webster,

for example, the ubiquity of the “new biology” in technological utopia-

nism implicitly reinforces the claims that the progress of information

technology is inevitable and reinforces the “ideology of industrializa-

Speculative­capital 135

tion,” which suggests that technology functions as the hidden and neu-

tral hand in social development.88

Tiziana Terranova similarly charts the use of organic metaphors in

the early work of cyberlibertarians Kelly and Howard Rheingold, at-

tending, for example, to the moment in Out of Control when Kelly fig-

ures the Internet as “a nest of snakes,” and investigating “the rhetoric of

the Net as a self- evolving organism, with a ‘natural’ ecology of its own.”89

For Kelly, military systems, computer networks, and the global financial

system alike maintain a complexity that is “taxing our ability to steer

them” and thereby require more efficient management strategies (308).

Terranova argues that a neobiological discourse was invoked to defend

against governmental infringement of privacy rights, as with the Clipper

Chip controversy, which would have resulted in encryption standards

that allowed governmental access with a universal master key.90 If vir-

tual communities and the “Information Superhighway” were understood

to be self- regulating and self- modifying, however, then regulation would

not be necessary: “This ‘electronic’ evolutionism reshuffles the hundred

year old history of evolutionary theory to accommodate netcitizens’ de-

mands for decentralization, self- regulation, and independence from in-

stitutional intervention.”91 At issue, then, is the control of information

flows. Terranova’s argument is that informational networks are not in-

ternally regulated but in fact constituted and shaped by “external” socio-

economic systems: “Electronic communication, far from being a self-

evolving natural system, is history- laden and socially determined. It is

also well inside the complex dynamic of economic and cultural strati-

fications built by another natural, self- evolving system, the market.”92

We might also note that Darwin’s theory of evolution did not strictly

address changes internal to a species but recognized environmental and

ecological factors. The further point here, one alluded to by Terranova

and echoed by Slavoj Žižek, is that evolutionary discourse and the natu-

ralization of informational networks occlude the material dynamics of

labor and power.93

The End of the American Century as We Knew It

In his wide- ranging study of world economies, Fernand Braudel medi-

tates on the periodic movements and conjunctural rhythms of history,

Speculative­capital136

contemplates our existence in both the short and the long term, within

periods that precede and outlive us, and then asks whether it is “possible

to identify a finite plane or body which, being the site of a movement,

fixes its time- span.”94 In other words, can we identify a point of closure,

an end, an afterlife— epistemological, temporal, geographic, psychic, or

otherwise— perhaps a post- American century, or a fourth wave? Can we

say that the American century or U.S. hegemony or U.S. capitalism is

an infinitely expanding idiom, or has the idiom and its time expired, its

spectacular and apocalyptic conclusion elegiacally captured on tape on

September 11? A different version of these questions comes from Arrighi

in The Long Twentieth Century, in which he addresses the most recent

systemic cycle of accumulation, the temporal unit named in the title of

the book, and asks whether capitalist history has reached its ends with

U.S. capitalism, whether “the structures of U.S. capitalism constitute the

ultimate limit of the six centuries- long process through which capitalist

power has attained its present, seemingly all- encompassing scale and

scope.”95 The answer he gives is no: the ends are more imaginable than

realizable, and capitalism will undoubtedly survive in new forms, in new

guises.96 Both its “own spontaneous generation” and its own destruction

are, as Arrighi says elsewhere, coded into capital’s “genes.”97

If it is the case, as it is also for Arrighi and Jameson, that capital is

bound to inevitable regeneration, doomed to repeat and exhaust the three

stages of accumulation, production, and speculation (M- C- M), the ques-

tion before us is what lies beyond the limit of U.S. capitalism and the

American century. The question is even whether they have in fact reached

their limit, since one could argue that recent displays of U.S. military

power have been compensatory and suggest that U.S. economic and cul-

tural hegemony is coming to an end.98 With which critical models might

we then project along a diachronic axis to imagine the ends and the fu-

tures of capital, U.S. capitalism, and historical epoch? An analysis of

this problem of the future must necessarily veer into the imaginative

rather than the descriptive and, appropriately enough, into specula-

tion.99 It makes perfect conceptual sense, then, that Arrighi and Beverly

Silver together figure the afterlife of U.S. hegemony as “a yet unknown

destination.”100 Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein also com-

ment on the dynamic and diachronic quality of a historical system, which

Speculative­capital 137

“is evolving second by second such that it is never the same at two suc-

cessive points in time.”101 Further, they suggest that the “trends” that dis-

turb the equilibrium of the system eventually destabilize it in a perma-

nent fashion, in effect creating a “real ‘crisis,’ meaning a turning point so

decisive that the system comes to an end and is replaced by one or more

alternative successor systems” (8). The form and content of this crisis—

the disequilibrium and bifurcations of the system— is unpredictable and

approximately Borgesian: as Hopkins and Wallerstein note, “There is

always more than one possibility at this point, and there is no way of

determining in advance what the outcome(s) will be. All one can do is as-

sess the likelihood that we are approaching a bifurcation (or are already

in the midst of one)” (8–9). It is also the case for Arrighi that the futures

of world systems should resemble forking paths, that the regeneration

of capital comes with an escape clause, a set of parenthetically noted

alternative futures (which I will come to) for the histories and futures of

capital. Capitalism’s futures, in other words, are marked by a significant

degree of indeterminacy. Because the outcomes of capitalist history are

essentially unknowable, the moment of its end, its futures, the afterlife,

and the subsequent cycle of accumulation have all been thought in terms

of crisis, turbulence, unpredictability, chaos.102

For both Hobsbawm and Wallerstein, this crisis is prefigured in the

upheavals of 1989.103 And though the outcomes of capitalist history are

not determinable in advance, for Arrighi, the ends of capitalism are imag-

inable in bifurcating apocalyptic visions:

Finally, to paraphrase Schumpeter, before humanity chokes (or basks) in the

dungeon (or paradise) of a post- capitalist world empire or of a post- capitalist

world market society, it may well burn up in the horrors (or glories) of the es-

calating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world

order. In this case, capitalist history would also come to an end but by re-

verting permanently to the systemic chaos from which it began six hundred

years ago and which has been reproduced on an ever- increasing scale with

each transition.104 (356)

For Arrighi, as for Braudel in his meditation on the beginnings of world

economies, the ends of capitalism haunt it from its inception in the four-

teenth century. Schumpeter’s rhetoric of internal mutation is apropos

here: capitalism bears within itself the elements of its own destruction

Speculative­capital138

and the capacity to bring itself to crisis. Schumpeter’s main argument

holds that it is the successful and regenerative runs of capitalism, not its

crises and failures, that damage and potentially short- circuit it, much

like the successful run of the butterfly, which dies shortly after its meta-

morphosis. The power of this insight notwithstanding, Schumpeter’s

basic premise about capitalism still holds, even through the doubts of

Arrighi and other theorists of late capitalism and economic globaliza-

tion on the question of its ultimate survival: capitalism “not only never

is but never can be stationary.”105 Capitalism’s dynamic quality and ten-

dency toward destructive biological shifts were, for Schumpeter, under-

standable in terms of extreme weather: creative destruction manifests

as a “perennial gale.”106 In that he theorized the evolutionary movements

of capitalism in terms of cataclysmic discontinuity, then, Schumpeter’s

organic paradigm was fundamentally unstable.107

The rhetoric of “systemic chaos” and of complexity was not available

to Schumpeter, but it permeates the discourse on finance capitalism and

globalization. For example, Bill Maurer draws on the discourse linking

economics to computer science and evolutionary biology to understand

the architectures of offshore finance as “complex, networked, evolving,

and adaptive systems.”108 As another example, Fernando Coronil simi-

larly critiques the new forms of wealth by citing Bankers Trust CEO

Charles Sanford’s disquisition on “particle finance,” which analogizes

the speculative futures of capital to quantum physics and modern biol-

ogy, with the attendant implication of unpredictability.109 The discourse

of complexity theory has also been incorporated into the discourse on

Empire, which, for Hardt and Negri, “cannot be represented by a ju-

ridical order, but it nonetheless is an order, an order defined by its vir-

tuality, its dynamism, and its functional inconclusiveness.”110 And for

Guéhenno, the age of networks is in fact “the age of complexity . . . an

age of incompletion and disequilibrium.”111 Richard Lee also works with

the dialectic of order and disequilibrium to outline the conceptual and

critical links between computer systems and world systems: “Since the

late 1960s, dynamical- systems research has led to a reconceptualization

of the world as one of complexity, determinate but unpredictable: order

within chaos (strange attractors); order out of chaos (dissipative struc-

Speculative­capital 139

tures); visual representation of pathological functions and natural forms

exhibiting non- integer dimensions (fractal geometry).”112

While a delineation of the analytic conjunctions between scientific

paradigms, specifically those related to computer systems, and those of

world systems would require a more detailed study, we may say by way

of an overview that it seems particularly appropriate that the dynamism

and flexibility of financial markets, world system, and network society

alike should find their descriptive embodiment in complexity theory:

both turn to excess and the remainder, that which cannot be captured

by, or forecast within, the system. The global system, in other words,

cannot ultimately be contained in, or explained by, discursive struc-

tures. Linking system, category, and historical period alike to complex-

ity theory marks a productive and powerful anxiety about both knowing

everything and about the unknown. As Manuel Castells notes in The

Power of Identity, “The turbulence of information flows will keep codes

in a constant swirl”— an energy and movement that is nonorganic by

interpretation and not by essence.113 Arrighi, again, performs a similar

analysis with his explicative suggestion that capital already has an in-

herent “ ‘flexibility’ and ‘eclecticism’ ” rather than consisting of “concrete

forms.”114 Given the sheer range of disciplinary schemata brought to bear

on the problem of the “global,” it is not surprising that it lacks a certain

semantic and analytic clarity, but the more germane and also ubiquitous

models for our historical period, the current cycle of accumulation, the

world system, and even global culture comment directly on this lack of

clarity and suggest that the “global” and the global economy are best

understandable in terms of abstraction, elasticity, and unknowabil-

ity.115 Such is it the case, then, that the unpredictability, uncertainty,

and indistinctness of the “afterlife” of the current cycle of capitalist

accumulation— the long twentieth century marked by the ascendance

of information as a commodity— would be understandable in terms of

complexity theory.116

I would be remiss if I were to conclude this section without introducing

Jean and John Comaroff ’s strong critique of economic models based on

complexity theory.117 To think in terms of “particle finance,” for example,

would be to erase the social. We might still recognize that market behavior

Speculative­capital140

is unknowable, unpredictable, and mystificatory, the Comaroffs suggest,

by thinking in terms of the occult. That is, figuring markets in terms

of the occult puts it back within the realm of the human; equally im-

portant, though not stated in their argument, the occult hearkens back

to Marx’s notion that value has an “occult” power of self- expansion.118

Thus economics begins to resemble magic as referentiality falls away

and industrial production gives way to finance. In that it has to do with

human perception and apprehension of external events and processes,

the occult maintains a greater purchase on the social and then is par-

ticularly well poised to combat the quintessential neoliberal pronounce-

ment that “there is no such thing as society.”119 So, too, have other crit-

ics theorized the IMF and the World Bank as belief systems (Fabricio

Sabelli) and capitalism as a religion (Susan George).120 In these mod-

els, we can see a similar investment in maintaining human agency. As

I would like to suggest, however, the principle of feedback has no less

of a purchase on the social, signifying as it does the intricate relations

between a system and its environment, with both wielding the power

to impact the other. On this score, it is instructive to turn to George

Soros, who has been a vocal critic of the efficient- market hypothesis;

as he dryly notes, “the idea that financial markets tend toward such an

equilibrium seems to be contradicted by the evidence.”121 What he calls

market fundamentalism— the contemporary version of laissez- faire that

is a “dangerous” and “convenient ideology for the rich and powerful”—

holds that government interference is the only force preventing markets

from achieving equilibrium.122 His alternative paradigm is based on a

theory of reflexivity, a feedback loop in a general sense between situation

and participants’ perception of that situation, and one that alludes as

well to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Gödel’s theorem, and evolu-

tionary systems theory.

Speculative Capital

As I have tried to demonstrate, Marx’s philosophical appraisal of the

speculative departure of capital from the material conditions of produc-

tion and circulation lies at the heart of the by- now- extensive discourse on

the abstractions of millennial or informational capitalism, which holds

Speculative­capital 141

that derivatives are more valuable than physical securities, and symbolic

goods and services have qualitatively superseded material goods. Since

the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the decoupling of the

dollar from the gold standard, currency no longer circulates with a solid

material basis; capital instead has become a series of transactional mes-

sages. It should, I hope, be patently clear that “speculative departure”

does not necessarily suggest that the real conditions of production have

been eclipsed. As the expansion of assembly lines makes evident, pro-

ductive activity has by no means disappeared.123

The historical precondition for the moment of speculative capital is

the end of international fixed currency standards in the 1970s, when

Nixon moved the dollar off the gold standard (August 1971) and the dol-

lar was devalued and exchange rates were henceforth “floated,” that is,

were determined by markets (1973).124 But the major shift in financial

policy occurred in 1979–80, when Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal

Reserve, broke with Keynesian principles and allowed the markets to

control interest rates in an attempt to curb inflation (conventional wis-

dom also holds that it was not until the Reagan and Thatcher adminis-

trations that neoliberal economic policies were adopted and the United

States and UK began systematically deregulating and privatizing mar-

kets and industries). The end of international fixed currency standards

was the beginning of the end of regulating the flows of international

capital.125 The consequence of “a single system of capital and monetary

exchange, operating in real time and tying together all financial mar-

kets” (103), is that national and supranational monetary policy “have

become totally dependent upon the f luctuations of financial markets,

which themselves are determined by the anticipated profitability of

stocks and bonds” (103). Finance capital is thus read as virtual, mobile,

“footloose,” even “friction- free.”126 The ascendance of finance over real

material goods and the separation of capital from the “concrete context

of its productive geography” facilitate this shift from imperial territory

to “modulating networks of command.”127

A quantitative and qualitative shift in the geo- economy was antici-

pated by Marx in Grundrisse. Describing what he called the “velocity of

turnover,” Marx “showed how speeding up the circulation of capital will

actually create more capital, along with a new form of capitalism: not

Speculative­capital142

only an accelerated one, but an economic process less attached to the

physical unit value of labour input.”128 In one of his many comments on

the dematerialization of money, Žižek notes that “money fetishism will

culminate with the passage to its electronic form, when the last traces

of its materiality have disappeared— it is only at this stage that it will

assume the form of an indestructible spectral presence.”129 Another rep-

resentative claim for the wholly immaterial aspect of electronic money

is made in an early book by Mark C. Taylor: “Electronic money is pure

image, which is nothing but the play of fleeting figures on a video screen”

(a claim he would no doubt retract after more than a decade of schol-

arly work on the material traces of electronic data).130 It is this seeming

antinomy of materiality and virtuality that data visualization projects

engage. Kurgan’s clock and Black Shoals, for example, make visible one

component of the material substrate of electronic money— light— which

is to say that virtual money in the form of encoded data must adhere to

physical laws. It moves quickly but never faster than the speed of light,

its putative instantaneity belied by the spatiotemporal coordinates of

the clock.

Fernando Coronil’s critique of the global market and its reduction

of material entities to numbers bears repeating here.131 That the global

market absorbs commodities and transforms them into stock market en-

tities has been discussed earlier in the chapter. Such technological ratio-

nalization appears to distill the West and the global North into virtual

financial networks, but in so doing, it also occludes the real modalities of

power. To a certain extent, these new media projects provide visual rep-

resentations of this logic of the global market, the transformation of ma-

terial bodies into statistics, assets, even geometric icons. But they also

insist on a rematerialization: capital may be speculative, these projects

suggest, but neither the social nor the human can be thought as dema-

terialized. All these works thus establish an explicit relation between the

abstraction of markets and the material consequences of finance capital.

This is evident not only in the growth and predatory behavior of

the artificial creatures but more strikingly perhaps in Lynn Hershman

Leeson’s Synthia (2000–2002), which inscribes the psychological ef-

fects of market fluctuations onto the body of a simulated character who

smokes, sleeps, manically dances, and enters into a kind of depressive

Speculative­capital 143

state in response to market data from the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and

Russell 2000 indices.132 First commissioned for the lobby of the Charles

Schwab off ices in San Francisco, Synthia was later modeled on the

Edison stock market ticker, with output in the form of a video rather

than stock tape. In all versions, the Synthia character exhibits a range

of behaviors keyed to 2 percent changes in the market: when elated, she

dances or shops at Christian Dior; when depressed, she sits anxiously

at her desk, drinks, shops at Goodwill, or goes to bed. What better illus-

tration of the symbiotic relationship between markets and people and of

the extent to which capital has become biopolitical? The kinetic temporal

interfaces, artificial creatures, and naturalized environments of Synthia,

John Klima’s ecosystm, and Black Shoals all suggest the flexibility of

capital and the continually evolving nature of data, a plasticity that

would not necessarily be communicated by a static map of the market.

All render the material effects and consequences of the markets visible

via a kind of embodiment, whether through Synthia’s manic- depressive

behavior, the predatory behavior of the flocks of birds in ecosystm, or

the survivalist tactics of the artificial creatures in Black Shoals. In this

sense, these projects prompt us to consider the relations between ma-

teriality and virtuality not in terms of a historical progression— with

money becoming increasingly dematerialized and abstract in the pas-

sage from gold to notes to digital bits— but, as Kojin Karatani suggests,

in terms of parallax.

Mary Poovey joins Mark C. Taylor in reading Long- Term Capital Man-

agement as the imagined fulfillment of the dream to abstract both the

form and the content of money. Her essay “Residual Materialities” cri-

tiques the historical and contemporary understanding of the shift from

materiality to abstraction as a natural progression and ends with a cau-

tionary note about pure speculation, the imagined separation of money

from materiality: at risk, Poovey notes, is “our future well- being.”133 To

further suspend the teleological and subvert the economic determinism

inherent in the historiographic paradigm offered by Alexander Bard and

Jan Söderqvist’s Netocracy— whereby Western socioeconomic systems

are understood to have evolved from feudalism to capitalism to informa-

tionalism, with land, property, and information as the primary objects

of wealth— we can employ the discourses on complexity and emergent

Speculative­capital144

behaviors.134 Emergence offers a different model of temporality, an al-

ternative to progressivist and linear historical narratives. It also offers

an engagement with futurity and a means by which we might imagine

the inchoate, indeterminate abyss beyond the long twentieth century. In

other words, we might account for the ubiquity of this rhetoric in the dis-

courses on finance capitalism— and account for the significance of a data

visualization project that explores the evolution of artificial creatures in

relation to finance— by noting that emergence offers an escape from the

paralysis of the “now,” the now that makes the futures of rights, social

demands, and social change seem impossible.

Animaris Speculatrix

We are now ready to return to the most significant component of Black

Shoals: ALife. With the design assistance of Cefn Hoile, the virtual en-

vironment within the planetarium has been populated by artificial and

evolving creatures that feed on the stars’ energy. The algorithms that

drive their evolution reproduce those found in natural environments: to

survive, in other words, the organisms must compete with each other for

limited resources. As Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway explain:

The creatures who survive will be those whose behaviour and knowledge about

their world allows them to find food more easily. The final results of this pro-

cess are impossible to predict, but we can guess at the likely course of evolu-

tion. It’s likely that early on creatures will develop simple “beliefs” about the

world— for instance, that a stock which is proving fruitful today will probably

also produce food tomorrow. Later, more sophisticated behaviour may emerge,

for instance some creatures will probably develop “grazing” techniques— based

on the belief that similar stocks (those in the immediate vicinity) will be behav-

ing similarly. Still more sophisticated models may develop— such as the ability

to recognise periodic movements or patterns of cause and effect.135

To a certain extent, then, the creatures were set loose, created, with the

expectation that they would learn to game the market, to coordinate and

implement their own rules for growth and development. (Hoile notes,

however, that “we were unable to determine if any creatures were able

to predict the zones of trading activity. That secret has gone with them

to their graves.” So we remain well within the realm of speculation.)136

Speculative­capital 145

Within the context of the virtual planetarium, both the artificial crea-

tures’ survival and success on the financial market appear to depend

on the ability to predict and control the system and to manage risk.

Profit with minimal risk was precisely the fantasy offered by the Black-

Scholes formula, which garnered the inventors the Nobel Prize in 1997

and provided Scholes and Robert Merton the rationale for their ill- fated

company, Long- Term Capital Management, whose losses spectacularly

included a billion dollars in two days in 1998.137 LTCM made one cru-

cial error: in the pursuit of their “vision of zero capitalism and infinite

leverage,” the fund managers failed to account for their own effect on

the financial markets.138 Autogena and Portway speak to the “feedback

effect” in this instance:

There are many theories about the cause of the crash, but the main reason

seems to be that their formula had no self- reflexiveness— they didn’t take into

account their own impact on the market. For instance, because they were so

successful, other investors would copy what they were investing in, which led

to a kind of “feedback effect” often seen in biological systems. This kind of ef-

fect is often the precursor to chaos in complexity theory, and the company had

to ride closer and closer to this edge of chaotic collapse. . . . We saw this story

as a kind of Icarus parable for those attempting to control complex systems.139

In other words, fund managers failed to notice the extent to which

LTCM seemed to make real “Marx’s notion of capital as an infinitely

productive self- reflexive loop.”140 Within the context of this visualization

project, we can see a parallel between the LTCM fund managers and the

artificial creatures in the shared impulse to run scenarios on the mar-

ket and attempt to predict future pricing activity. Conventional wisdom

now understands that this kind of predictive simulation exercise has an

actual material effect on the market, and herein lies a crucial distinc-

tion between a colonization of the futures of financial markets (as with

shorting stock) and the creatures’ evolution, “the final results” of which

are “impossible to predict.”

“Feedback” means that system and environment are both altered as

a result of their interaction.141 Within a feedback loop, information is

not simply circulated; rather, the environment affects the system (input),

and in turn the system affects the environment (output). Both input

and output are bound up in a loop, such that each in turn receives and

Speculative­capital146

then sends back information that transforms the other. There is a tempo-

ral division between the two, but each wields a material, performative,

and generative power. Often generally discussed in terms of distortion,

dissonance, and interruption, the feedback loop within this particular

context might be understood in terms of the interaction between fund

and market on the one hand and between the creatures and their vir-

tual environment on the other. What we of course should never forget

is that, far from being a wholly self- sufficient or hermetic system, what

appears to be the purely internal function of the markets that govern the

creatures’ growth is itself dependent on seemingly invisible but indubi-

tably operative sociopolitical forces. In this regard, what we might see in

Black Shoals is an exemplary instance of Jacques Rancière’s critique of

First ALife, Black Shoals, 2001.

Speculative­capital 147

what inhibits the possible work of politics today. As Rancière observes,

there is a perception that “the work proper to politics simply [involves]

an opportune adaptability in terms of the demands of the world mar-

ketplace and the equitable distribution of the profits and costs of this

adaptability.”142

Our historical moment, the speculative stage of finance capital, thus

finds its paradigmatic figure in Black Shoals: a virtual environment

populated by ALife creatures that in effect realizes De Landa’s vision

of a spontaneously self- organizing model of a financial market. During

World War II, Schumpeter suggested that when we are dealing with

capitalism, “we are dealing with an organic process.”143 However, sixty-

plus intervening years have brought us to a point where we must now

consider capitalist processes and financial markets as not inorganic but

nonorganic. The nonorganic is a complex system that has energy, move-

ment, and dynamism. It is not biologically alive, but neither is it an inert,

inanimate, material structure: it functions like an organic entity, yet it is

not. The process by which the creatures came “alive” is instructive.

The primary results are discernible with the naked eye. Creatures evolved

which could coordinate muscular stretching and relaxing with foot control,

leading to energy- efficient, natural looking gaits which allowed them to ex-

plore and discover pockets of trading activity within the star space. Some crea-

tures developed sensorimotor control, responding to food in their environment

by modifying their gait, turning, and heading towards food. A large variety of

strategies were seen to emerge.144

Dubbed Animaris Speculatrix, or “speculating animal,” by Hoile, the

creatures trace their lineage back to William Grey Walter’s Machina

Speculatrix.145 Walter, the “pioneer” of ALife, was, as Anders Michelsen

persuasively argues, integral to the development of postwar computa-

tional research, his robotic tortoise “Elsie” providing the audience of

Scientific American with an image of the domesticated robot- as- child

and Hoile with a model for an artificial creature programmed to seek out

light.146 On this point, too, we might note that stars are precisely that—

light, traces of prior presence.147 The project thus maintains a complex

engagement with the seeming antinomy of virtuality and materiality.

Because of the physical limitations of disk space, Hoile explains, the

population of creatures was deliberately controlled. As a result, “no data

Speculative­capital148

exists on the many thousands of species who lived and died in the dome”

and “the results largely remain in the minds of the visitors to the ex-

hibit.” Black Shoals, then, is ultimately a performance, a quintessential

work of virtuosity for which there is no finite, consumable product.

I want to conclude by highlighting one aspect of the critical response

to Black Shoals: that the project potentially runs the risk of hyper-

aestheticism, particularly in that gallery viewers do not know quite what

to do when first encountering the work. In this respect, the planetarium

might be in danger of mimetically reproducing the mysterious opera-

tions of capitalism. Might we, though, turn this around and suggest that

placing the viewer in a position of uncertainty is precisely the point? And

that the project maintains a certain investment in denying the kind of

mastery it initially seems to offer (with the capture of all of the world’s

major stock exchange data feeds in a containable physical space)? The

planetarium dome reminds us of galaxies unseen; all we are offered is

a kind of astronomic slice. As Jaime Stapleton notes in his response to

the project, the biological “model holds out the possibility that it will

provide a key that will reduce the messy, discontinuous, contingent and

subjective experience of life into a regular, and mappable, set of opera-

tions. . . . The promise offered by such a faith is that either through sci-

entific rationality, or the intuition of beauty, an individual may attain a

perspective unobtainable to the rest of society, and with it, a measure of

power over that society.”148 Black Shoals provides an implicit indictment

of that conservative promise, that we await the one— a Neo character,

perhaps— who is able to see the patterns inherent in the streams of data.

Viewers are implicated in the work not only via that fantasy of mastery

and via their role as audience members who receive and complete the

signifying chain of the performance, but also by the encouragement of

an empathetic, identificatory relationship between us and them, viewer

and creature:

It was vital that the viewers were able to empathise with the creatures and

their small existence. The creatures’ relationship with their artificial world of

stars is a mirror image of our relationship with the financial markets— they

strive to survive, competing with each other in a world whose complexity they

are too simple to fathom. To encourage the viewer to identify with the crea-

tures, lifelike and purposeful behaviours had to emerge.149

Speculative­capital 149

When a viewer enters the space of the planetarium, she is not im-

mediately certain of her place in relation to the (financial) universe and

she is presented with a sense of her own inconsequentiality, a sense that

the universe has preceded her and will outlast her. She inserts herself

within the space of the work then via her identification with the artificial

creatures. Or, rather, naming the creatures Animaris Speculatrix allows

Hoile and the artists to suggest that the viewer empathizes with the

creatures not by imagining herself elsewhere but by situating the crea-

tures within the space of the domestic, the human, as was the case with

Grey Walter’s Machina Speculatrix, the robotic tortoise introduced to

the world as his child. This sense of domesticating the system, however,

is itself illusory because, just as the creatures “strive to survive, compet-

ing with each other in a world whose complexity they are too simple to

fathom,” we as functionaries of the capitalist market are placed in the

same position as the creatures themselves. The creatures function ac-

cording to an evolutionary paradigm, but they lack the reflexivity that

allows them to manipulate that paradigm; so, too, we “strive to survive”

but lack sufficient reflexivity not to be managed by it at the same time.

That is to say, while we may each hold to the illusion of our agency in re-

lation to the market, the illusion of our capacity individually to manage

capitalist markets, we are always caught within a paradigm that is too

complex and that in effect manages us. It is this overarching insight that

lies behind Black Shoals as a project.

In what, after all, is a virtuoso performance of the effects of capital,

the viewer is a necessarily significant component of the work. As with

the figuring of speculative capital as occult, we are reminded in this con-

text of the importance of human perception of financial markets. So, too,

we might regard the conceptual weight given to the viewer in light of

Paolo Virno’s thesis and note that living memory substitutes for extrinsic

product. Black Shoals does not produce revolutionary change, nor does

it offer a formula for the overthrow of capitalism. What it does offer is

a socially engaged, participatory, and pedagogical intervention into the

discourse on financial markets. As with many of the projects discussed

in this book, it is a symbolic performance, a temporary disruption of

dominant semiotic regimes.

Speculative­capital150

Coda

By this point, readers will no doubt perceive that tactical media occupies

a spectrum ranging from direct action (e.g., denial- of- service attacks

and game space interventions) to symbolic performance (e.g., data visu-

alization). There is no absolute distinction between the two poles of the

spectrum; instead I suggest we think in terms of gradations of differ-

ence. Black Shoals is clearly not disruptive in the sense of a full- scale at-

tack on the financial- computing networks that structure contemporary

capitalism. Its visualization tactics may not reach the level of action in

the most ordinary sense of the word, but in that the project uses capi-

talist machines against themselves, it is on the way to becoming such.

It is tactical media in the sense of virtuosic performance and cultural

critique. However, in at least two respects, a project such as Black Shoals

is possible only with the assistance of the financial markets themselves.

Reuters data feeds are extraordinarily expensive, to start, and because

the data feeds provided real- time information, security clearance had to

be obtained from all exchanges, and the names of the stars had to be omit-

ted from the Tate exhibit.150 Here we can ask a set of perhaps- familiar

questions: How meaningful can such an intervention be from the belly

of the beast? What difference does corporate sponsorship make for anti-

corporate and anticapitalist art projects? What is the social function of

art in the context of late capitalism? What, if any, are the relations be-

tween ideologies of the free market and ideologies of aesthetic autonomy?

Such questions might best be addressed through the artworks them-

selves. Black Shoals, again, is a financial visualization wholly embedded

within the structures of finance capital. The installation is nothing if

not subtle, and my overarching suggestion here is that subtlety and vir-

tuosic technicity can be a kind of tactics. Moreover, my admiration for

the subtlety of Black Shoals as an aesthetico- political intervention into

the discourses and practices of finance capitalism derives from the sense

that the possibility for critical awareness under capitalism requires more

than ironic consumption, alternative branding, and parodic play, not-

withstanding the occasional flash of genius from Adbusters and others.

Black Shoals is not a withdrawal from markets but a tactical engagement

and confrontation on the terrain of capitalist power itself. No doubt there

is a long- term tradition of such engagement, and no one is likely to claim

Speculative­capital 151

otherwise. Indeed, we might look no further for analogous art practices

than to Peter Bürger’s commentary on the avant- garde’s work within the

institutions of art to undermine those very institutions. However, this

book is by no means alone in noticing that socially engaged and activist-

art practices not only continue to proliferate but also maintain a critical

and cultural relevance.151 What my primary themes— immigration poli-

tics, war, capital— should indicate is that these practices, whether writ-

ten under the sign of art, culture work, or guerrilla tactics, are strongest

when informed by, and responsive to, an intellectual discourse that al-

lows them to rise to the level of legitimate cultural critique. In this re-

gard, when we consider the range of countermeasures and counterpres-

sures that can be brought to bear against the neoliberal world order, I

do not think we need to balk at evaluative distinctions between the two

ends of the tactical media spectrum— between, for example, cybersquat-

ting battles and hoaxes (Etoy, Vaticano.org, GWBush.com) and the algo-

rithmic sophistication of Black Shoals: the difference, again, is virtuos-

ity, technological expertise exhibited in a publicly organized space.

While tactical media has clearly evolved from its emergence in the

1990s to the virtuosic art practices of today, there is one important point

of continuity: tactical media activities provide models of opposition

rather than revolution and aim to undermine a system that, as de Certeau

reminds us, “itself remains intact.”152 What I wish to stress is that we

need not, and indeed should not, think of political engagement strictly in

terms of concrete action, organizational movements, or overt commen-

tary. Such a statement is certainly informed by the kind of sensibility

that I articulate in this book’s opening lines— that of a generation lack-

ing an uncompromising faith in the efficacy of street- based protest, but

well aware of the participatory force of smart mobs, Googlebombing, and

peer- to- peer networking. The temporal horizon of tactics by no means

obviates the need for strategic campaigns or precludes the possibility of

long- term structural transformation. It remains the case, however, that

a belief in the possibility of revolution as an event singularly located in

space and time has been supplanted by an investment in a multiplic-

ity of actions, practices, performances, and interventions. Tactical media

contests the future terrain of the political, but it does so via virtuosic

performances deployed and experienced in the present.

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153

Introduction

The chapter epigraph is from http://www.serpicanaro.com. For brief commentary

on the Serpica Naro trademark, brand, political project, and hoax, see Matteo Pas-

quinelli, “Operation Serpica Naro: Milan Fashion Industry Spoofed by Anti- precarity

Activists,” Nettime post, February 28, 2005; and “An Assault on Neurospace (Mis-

guided Directions For),” July 2005, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/07/

19/0441211&mode=nested&tid=9&tid=15.

1. http://www.theyrule.net. Also see Next Five Minutes, “Tactical Cartography:

Diagrams of Power,” http://www.next5minutes.org/article.jsp?articleid=749 (Sep-

tember 2003).

2. One brief anecdotal note will suffice to suggest the extent to which Lombardi’s

drawings, and by extension They Rule, can be regarded simultaneously as “art” and as

investigative journalism: after 9/11, the FBI contacted the Whitney to see Lombardi’s

last work, BCCI, ICIC & FAB (1996–2000).

3. On the role of laughter and the carnivalesque in political dissent, see Marieke

de Goede, “Carnival of Money: Politics of Dissent in an Era of Globalizing Finance,”

in The Global Resistance Reader, ed. Louise Amoore (London: Routledge, 2005),

379–91.

4. http://turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard.

5. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post­ industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecast­

ing (New York: Penguin Books, 1973); and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network

Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 18–21, 143–44. In a related analysis, Dan Schiller

focuses on the role of neoliberal policies in facilitating “an epochal political- economic

transition” into “digital capitalism.” See Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking and

the Global Market System (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), xvii. Nick Dyer-

Witheford also points out that the expansion of the global financial markets is “in-

separable from the expansion of information technology.” Nick Dyer- Witheford,

Cyber­ Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High­ Technology Capitalism (Urbana:

Notes

154 NoteS­to­iNtroductioN

University of Illinois Press, 1999), 139. The lesson we can glean from these later

studies is that privatization policies, particularly of telecommunications networks,

have facilitated electronic commerce and laid the foundations for a global network

economy.

6. See http://www.molleindustria.org/en/tuboflex.

7. Michael Rush, New Media in Late Twentieth­ Century Art (London: Thames

and Hudson, 1999); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT Press, 2001); Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science,

and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Christiane Paul, Digital Art

(London: Thames and Hudson, 2003); Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online

Clash of Culture and Commerce (London: Tate, 2003); Rachel Greene, Internet Art

(London: Thames and Hudson, 2004); Lucy Kimbell, ed., New Media Art: Practice

and Context in the UK, 1994–2004 (Manchester: Arts Council England, 2004); Bruce

Wands, Art of the Digital Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006); Mark Tribe and

Reena Jana, New Media Art (London: Taschen, 2006); Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito,

At the Edge of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006).

8. Representative texts on the topic of network- based activism include Tim

Jordan, Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism, and the Future of Society (London:

Reaktion Books, 2002); Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the In­

ternet (New York: Routledge, 2002); Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, Cyber­

activism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2003). On

smart mobs see Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cam-

bridge: Perseus, 2002); and http://www.smartmobs.com.

9. Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media

(New York: Autonomedia, 2001), 7.

10. Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Internet Culture (Cambridge, MIT Press,

2002), 271.

11. Ibid., 256. The site for the fourth edition of the conference is available at http://

www.next5minutes.org/index.jsp. Other festivals and shows devoted to tactical media

include Upgrade Montreal (April 2006), http://theupgrade.sat.qc.ca.

12. Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance, 5.

13. Lovink, Dark Fiber, 258.

14. Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance, 8.

15. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia,

1994), 12.

16. Quoted in Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–2000, trans. Liz

Carey- Libbrecht and James A. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2000), 118.

17. http://bureauit.org/cab.

18. See http://www.critical- art.net/tactical_media/eyebeam/index.html.

19. http://www.netbase.org/t0.

20. http://bureauit.org/kit.

155NoteS­to­iNtroductioN

21. http://www.carbondefense.org/projects.html.

22. CAE/CDL , “Child as Participant” video documentation, http://w w w.

carbondefense.org/video/ChildAsParticipant.mov. That a purchase on certain out-

comes should be surrendered is similarly indicated by one of Randall Packer’s self-

reflexive comments as part of his blog- chronicles as secretary- at- large of the U.S. De-

partment of Art and Technology: “I then armed myself against justice, and declared,

‘Where Art can contribute to the Perpetual Fight against Authoritarianism, I shall

confront the Powers that be.’ I announced I would ‘see the artistic process through . . .

whatever its outcome.’ ” “A Season in Hell,” January 15, 2005, http://www.usdat.us/

secretary/archives/crushed_by_reality.

23. Nathan Martin, “Parasitic Media: Invisibility and Other Forms of Tactical

Augmentation,” Subsol, http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/martintext.html.

24. Jon McKenzie and Rebecca Schneider, “Critical Art Ensemble: Tactical Media

Practitioners,” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 140. Also see

Lovink, Dark Fiber, 259.

25. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular

Ideas (New York: Autonomedia, 1996), 24.

26. Lovink, Dark Fiber, 261.

27. This is not to say that all those who think about and practice tactical media

have abandoned both the rhetoric and the idea of revolution. For example, Gene Ray

concludes his plea for the reinvigoration of tactical media via a return to thinking

about totality and structural transformation: “Proclaiming revolution a dead letter

got us nowhere, and to continue to do so now is to condemn in advance all those who

have renewed anti- capitalist struggle.” Ray, “Tactical Media and the End of the End of

History,” Afterimage 34, nos. 1–2 (2006), revised version at http://www.linksnet.de/

textsicht.php?id=2723.

28. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Lon-

don: Polity Press, 2004), 104.

29. Josh On, comment at http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2004/05/24/antiwargame.

30. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The California Ideolog y” (August

1995), http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/calif Ideo_I.html.

31. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience, 22.

32. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the

Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 92; and Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the

Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 25.

33. McKenzie Wark also comments on this aspect of Lovink and Garcia’s mani-

festo in “The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual [Version 3.0],”

in New Media, Old Media, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 273.

34. Lovink, Dark Fiber, 257. On this theme of resistance from within, one can

clearly see the influence of Michel de Certeau’s theorizing of tactics on early practices

of tactical media: “Wasting of products, diversion of time, ‘la perruque,’ turn- over or

156 NoteS­to­iNtroductioN

inactivity of employees, etc., undermine from within a system which . . . tends to be-

come a form of imprisonment in order to prevent any sort of escape.” De Certeau, The

Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1984), 179.

35. John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Glo­

balization (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), 96.

36. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 81.

37. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza

Woods (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 14.

38. Ibid., 61.

39. Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance, 9.

40. Ibid., 10.

41. Lovink, Dark Fiber, 261, 267.

42. Chris Atton, An Alternative Internet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2004).

43. http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/vaticano.org/index.html.

44. For the special issue of Subsol, see http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/index.html.

Echoes of de Certeau make their way into Mackenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) as well, particularly in his sug-

gestion that we have “an alternative practice of everyday life” instead of a moment of

violent rupture (257).

45. Tactical Media Crew, http://www.tmcrew.org/enghome.htm.

46. “Contestational Robotics: Critical Art Ensemble and the Institute for Applied

Autonomy,” http://www.appliedautonomy.com/objectors.html.

47. http://www.we- swipe.us.

48. See, for example, “pôle financier,” http://bureaudetudes.free.fr/images/banques

.gif.

49. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, eds., The Interventionists (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

50. Neither is my book a regional study necessarily, as is the study of Italian hack-

tivism and Net art by Tatiana Bazzichelli, founder of the AHA, Networking: La rete

come arte [Networking: The Net as Artwork] (Milan: Costa and Nolan, 2006).

51. See http://www.vote- auction.net/ and http://www.gwei.org.

52. See http://www.amazon- noir.com/books.html.

53. The two artists translate “Ubermorgen” in these terms on their bio page, http://

www.ubermorgen.com/2007/index.html.

54. John Klima, Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain, commissioned by the

“Mapping Transitions” conference at the University of Colorado (September 2002),

http://www.cityarts.com/colorado. Klima’s original plan was to use mental health

statistics as the index for the emotional map, but these statistics are incomplete.

157NoteS­to­iNtroductioN

55. Klima, “Description,” PLET, http://www.cityarts.com/colorado/release/index

.html.

56. The Spritelab has an example of A* in lingo at http://www.spritelab.dk/beta/

Astar.html. For the implementation of the A*, see Elaine Rich and Kevin Knight,

Artificial Intelligence, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991).

57. “Proposal: Mapping Transitions.”

58. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley

(New York: Random House, 1978), 137.

59. Stephen Wilson classifies artistic engagements with science and technology

as the “information arts,” which encompass robotics and kinetics, ALife, VR, body

monitoring, position sensing, AI, telepresence, genetics, algorithms and mathemat-

ics, Internet visualization, ecology and physical phenomena, information systems,

and telecommunications. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Tech­

nology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

60. See, for example, Lisa Jevbratt, Out of the Ordinary and 1:1, at http://jevbratt

.com/projects.html.

61. John Klima, “Proposal: Mapping Transitions” (July 2002), http://www.cityarts

.com/colorado/proposal/index.html.

62. John Klima, “Project Description” (January 2002), http://www.cityarts.com/

langlois/teramachine.html#project.

63. The phrase “neoliberal globalization” makes clear that globalization is a politi-

cal project rather than an inevitability. It suggests economic restructuring, the open-

ing of national economies to the IMF and World Bank, and policies of deregulation

and privatization.

64. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990,

trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 181.

65. Fernando Coronil, “Toward a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capi-

talism’s Nature,” in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 63–87.

66. Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg also suggest such a difference in

their coauthored essay “Artistic Data Visualization: Beyond Visual Analytics,” http://

www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/artistic- infovis.pdf.

67. “The ABC of Tactical Media,” Nettime post, May 16, 1997.

68. Valdis Krebs, “Political Patterns on the W W W,” http://w w w.orgnet.com/

leftright.html.

69. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 69.

70. See Pit Schultz, “The Final Content,” Nettime post, April 4, 1997; Alvin Toffler,

Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (New

York: Bantam, 1990), 75; Geert Lovink, “Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class

(Arthur Kroker in Conversation),” in Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual

Intelligentsia, by Geert Lovink (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 50–57.

NoteS­to­cHapter­1158

71. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 2000), 211.

72. Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2007), 104.

73. Perhaps the preeminent cyberlibertarian statement is John Perry Barlow’s

declaration that national governments have no authority over online communities,

the new tribe of the mind. An earlier study of the politics of cyberlibertarianism is

Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, ed. Ziauddin

Sardar and Jerome Ravetz (London: Pluto Press, 1996).

74. Hakim Bey, T. A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy,

Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 127.

75. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Time to Back Up?” Knowbotic Research (June 29, 2000),

http://io.khm.de/back- up/alles/links.html.

76. Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 294.

77. Ibid., 293.

78. Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 176.

79. See, for example, the call for works reflecting on the theme of “transvergence”

at ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) 2006, http://01sj.org/content/

view/76/71.

80. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 13.

81. Lovink and Ned Rossiter, “Dawn of the Organised Networks,” Nettime, Oc-

tober 17, 2005.

82. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 52.

83. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, quoted in Virno, Grammar of the

Multitude, 53.

84. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 53.

85. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” in The Field

of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (London: Polity Press, 1993),

254–66.

86. “Precarity” was the term given to the condition of intermittent work at the time

of the Marches against Unemployment, Job Insecurity, and Social Exclusion (2000).

1. Border Hacks

1. “CAUTION” (DoEAT). San Diego Indymedia (September 2, 2005), http://

sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2005/09/110862.shtml.

2. A thorough catalog of the icon’s repurposing can be found in Leslie Bere stein,

“Highway safety sign becomes running story on immigration,” San Diego Union­

Tribune, April 10, 2005, http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news_

1n10signs.html.

NoteS­to­cHapter­1 159

3. Shannon Spanhake of DoEAT cites the Situationists as an influence, along

with Dada, Hans Haacke, the Yes Men, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and others.

“A Short Interview with artist Shannon Spanhake about the DoEAT group,” July 22,

2005, http://post.thing.net/node/394.

4. DoEAT’s particular art performance was both physical and networked, in that

the circulation of the images is an integral component of the work.

5. For an expansive articulation of the two logics of power, see David Harvey, The

New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31; Fredric Jameson,

“Culture and Finance Capital,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 251; and Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

2000), xii.

6. For a study focusing on the period between 1848 (when the border is estab-

lished by treaty) and World War I, see Juan Mora- Torres, The Making of the Mexican

Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

7. See Ted Robbins, “San Diego Fence Provides Lessons in Border Control,” NPR,

April 6, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5323928. Events

are unfolding too quickly for me to keep the references current, but I will note that

my thinking on issues pertaining to the wall between the United States and Mexico

crystallized in December 2005, at the time of the congressional approval of H.R.

4437 (sponsored by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner [WI- 5], introduced on

December 6, 2005), the stated purpose of which is to amend the Immigration and

Nationality Act to strengthen enforcement of the immigration laws, to enhance bor-

der security, and for other purposes. In the same month, the Department of Home-

land Security was given clearance by way of the Real ID Act to continue construction

of the wall, which had been held up for environmental review. See Eilene Zimmer-

man, “Against the Wall,” Salon, December 12, 2005, http://archive.salon.com/news/

feature/2005/12/12/border_wall/index.html.

8. The U.S. Border Patrol only began recording migrant deaths in 1998, so all sta-

tistics are necessarily estimated. Stop Gatekeeper! http://stopgatekeeper.org/English/

index.html; Marc Cooper, “On the Border of Hypocrisy,” L A Weekly, December 4,

2003, http://w w w.laweekly.com/general/features/on- the- border- of- hypocrisy/2157.

9. See http://stopgatekeeper.org/English/index.html.

10. “U.S. Border Patrol Strategic Plan for 1994 & Beyond.” Discussed in http://

www.stopgatekeeper.org/English/facts.htm.

11. On the bidding for federal contracts to develop the virtual fence, see Eric Lip-

ton, “Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control,” New York Times,

May 18, 2006, A1.

12. For a thorough account of the failures of biometric testing, see Charlotte

Epstein, “Biopolitics, Governmentality, and the North- South Divide,” ISA Workshop

Paper (March 2006).

13. Étienne Balibar, “Europe: An ‘Unimagined’ Frontier of Democracy,” diacritics

NoteS­to­cHapter­1160

33, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2003): 40. Balibar has long argued for the democratization

of borders, “not only as in their opening (and not as their generalized abolition, which

in many cases would simply lead to a renewed war of all against all in the form of sav-

age competition among economic forces), but above all as a multilateral, negotiated

control of their working by the populations themselves (including, of course, migrant

populations).” See We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,

trans. James Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 117.

14. Peter Andreas, Border Games (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Also see Andreas, “A Tale of Two Borders: The U.S.–Canada and U.S.–Mexico Lines

after 9- 11,” in The Rebordering of North America: Integration and Exclusion in a New

Security Context, ed. Peter Andreas and Thomas J. Biersteker (New York: Routledge,

2003), 1–23.

15. Ulrich Beck, “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,” Theory,

Culture, and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 41.

16. Ibid.

17. Joanne Richardson, “The Language of Tactical Media,” subsol 2, http://subsol

.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/richardsontext2.html.

18. Jon McKenzie and Rebecca Schneider, “Critical Art Ensemble: Tactical Media

Practitioners,” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 137.

19. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:

Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

20. No doubt there are many studies of post- European cinema with respect to

migrants and asylum seekers still to come, addressing such films as Since Otar Left

(Dir. Julie Bertucelli, 2003). This is not to suggest, however, that there is no nar-

rative video or film dedicated to the U.S.–Mexico border. See, for example, Ursula

Biemann’s video essay “Performing the Border” (1999), http://www.medienkunstnetz

.de/works/performing- the- border.

21. Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Internet Culture (Cambridge, MIT Press,

2002), 255.

22. The privileging of Anglo- Protestant culture in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash

of Civilizations manifests as an outright defense in his Who Are We? The Challenges

to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

23. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1996), 28.

24. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New

York: Verso, 2004), 39.

25. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2005), 43. On Agamben’s reading of the role of consuls, proxy sov-

ereignties, and the collapse of the “distinction between public and private authority,”

see Louise Amoore, “Economies of Exception: Consulting, Culture, the Camp,” ISA

Workshop Paper (March 2006), 9.

NoteS­to­cHapter­1 161

26. “Web Users to ‘Patrol’ US Border,” BBC News, June 2, 2006, http://news.bbc

.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5040372.stm.

27. “Homeland Security to Build Detention Camps in the United States,” Business

Wire, January 24, 2006.

28. Butler, Precarious Life, 33.

29. The May 2006 action was one of a long- term series directed against the Min-

utemen and related organizations; see http://swarmtheminutemen.com. For a de-

scription of the 2005 SWARM campaign, for example, see the interview with Ricardo

Dominguez, “A Transparent and Civil Act of Disobedience,” June 12, 2005, http://

post.thing.net/node/304.

30. For a thorough overview of Electronic Disturbance Theater, electronic civil

disobedience, and the first deployments of FloodNet, see Graham Meikle, Future Ac­

tive: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002), 140–72.

31. “How This Action Works,” http://swarmtheminutemen.com/cartography/how

.html. For another description of FloodNet actions, see the interview with Raphie

Frank and Mindy Bond, “Ricardo Dominguez, Artist and Electronic Civil Dis-

obedience Pioneer,” Gothamist, November 29, 2004, http://w w w.gothamist.com/

archives/2004/11/29/ricardo_dominguez_artist_and_electronic_civil_disobedience_

pioneer.php.

32. Oxblood Ruffin, “Hacktivism, from Here to There,” Yale Law School Confer-

ence on Cybercrime (2004), http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/digital%20cops/papers/

ruffin_hacktivism.pdf.

33. The commentary on the question of hacktivism as terrorism is extensive, fo-

cusing often on the Electronic Disturbance Theater attacks against the Pentagon and

the White House sites. As just one example, see Dorothy E. Denning, “Hacktivism: An

Emerging Threat to Diplomacy,” Foreign Service Journal, September 2000, http://

www.afsa.org/fsj/sept00/Denning.cfm. Also see Alan Liu’s discussion of Critical Art

Ensemble and terrorism in The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of

Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 367–68.

34. See, for example, the InfoSecurity archives at http://w w w.attrition.org/

pipermail/isn.

35. Michael Dartnell, Insurgency Online: Web Activism and Global Conflict (To-

ronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

36. Coco Fusco, “On- line Simulations/Real- Life Politics,” TDR: The Drama Re­

view 47, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 155. Dominguez also notes that in its institutionaliza-

tion as “art,” “EDT has only been absorbed [into gallery spaces] as documentation

and not as a hosted performance.” Quoted in Jenny Marketou, “Where Do We Go

from Here?” Net Art Commons, July 23, 2002, http://netartcommons.walkerart.org.

There is a certain link here between art as documentation and the situation of art and

argument alike within the simulation rules of a game (wherein the work is less the

entity of the game than its scenario, rules, and code).

NoteS­to­cHapter­1162

37. FloodNet Foyer, http://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapsTactical/foyer3.htm.

38. John Arquilla has described FloodNet specifically as “the info age equivalent

of the first sticks of bombs dropped from slow- moving Zeppelins in the Great War.”

Quoted in Meikle, Future Active, 157.

39. “What This Action Is About,” http://swarmtheminutemen.com/cartography/

about.html. To fill out a taxonomy of wired activism on the issue of borders, one must

mention other activist organizations that use new media for organizational purposes:

deleteTheBorder.org, the Organic Collective, and noborder.org. The slogans and core

principles of these (often civil- disobedience- based) campaigns are as follows: an end

to deportations and detentions; freedom of movement; papers for all.

40. In his analysis of the war machine as a watching machine, Paul Virilio quotes

William Perry, former U.S. secretary of defense: “Once you see the target, you can

expect to destroy it.” War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick

Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989), 3.

41. They begin with the concept of “cyberwar” and eventually settle on “netwar.”

See John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar Is Coming!” Comparative Strategy

12 (April–June 1993): 141–65; Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime,

and Militancy (Rand, 2001). A growing number of humanities researchers are turn-

ing their critical attention to Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s work. See, for example, Samuel

Weber, Targets of Opportunity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 90–108.

42. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico

(Rand, 1998), 15. Also see their Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Rand, 2000).

43. Ricardo Dominguez, Stefan Wray, Brett Beestal, and Osea, “SWAR M: An

ECD Project for Ars Electronica Festival ’98,” http://w w w.thing.net/%7Erdom/ecd/

swarm.html.

44. For a thorough review of some of these aspects of Critical Art Ensemble, see

Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool, 364–67.

45. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia,

1994), 111. Žižek makes a similar point in his contrarian analysis of Naomi Klein in

Organs without Bodies.

46. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular

Ideas (New York: Autonomedia, 1996), 11; and The Electronic Disturbance, 24. As I

put the finishing touches on this chapter, news came of the successful student pro-

tests in France and the mass protests against immigration policy across the United

States (including protests in Washington, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and

Phoenix in the spring of 2006). We are reminded, then, that street- based protests

are far from obsolete and can in fact have a material effect on public policy. With is-

sues of party allegiance and voter registration in mind, it will be interesting to see how

the political establishment responds to mass protests from the Latino voting bloc.

47. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age

of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 68.

NoteS­to­cHapter­1 163

48. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience, 23.

49. Ibid., 31, 32. In their manifesto for tactical media, David Garcia and Geert

Lovink link the mobility of tactical media to migrant culture.

50. Stefan Wray, “On Electronic Civil Disobedience” (1998), http://w w w.thing

.net/~rdom/ecd/oecd.html.

51. Stefan Wray, “Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hack-

tivism: A Mapping of Extraparliamentarian Direct Action Net Politics,” Switch 4,

no. 2 (1998): http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v4n2/stefan.

52. McKenzie and Schneider, “Critical Art Ensemble,” 144.

53. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience, 13.

54. In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conf lict in the Information Age (Rand,

1997), 30.

55. Borderhack!— a camping- activist event organized by Mexican Net activists for

Labor Day 2000— also focused on critical awareness rather than outright destruc-

tion, as the attendant manifesto makes clear: “We propose this Borderhack, a camp

that does not pretend to destroy the border, but, in a worst case scenario, only to make

us conscious of it.” Luis Humberto Rosales and Fran Ilich, “Borderhack 2000,” http://

web.archive.org/web/20010629030310/www.neuroticos.com/borderhack/ab2.html.

56. It should be noted that disruption per se is not an unqualified good and cer-

tainly not always tactical. In fact there is a certain capacity for banality and pettiness

in the obstruction of network traffic or specifically intraoffice network communica-

tions, as Kok- Chian Leong’s project Corporate Sabotage indicates. See http://01sj.org/

content/view/251/49.

57. Meikle, Future Active, 154.

58. Wray writes in 1998 that the power of FloodNet applets perhaps “lies more

in the simulated threat,” though greater participation has meant greater efficacy.

Dominguez notes in an interview that “to actually flood a server so that it cannot

run properly, literally hundreds if not thousands must engage in the action at a given

time; in that sense, collective use of the software constitutes the critical mass needed

for the action to be ‘felt.’ But being able to down a server and actually doing it are two

different things.” See Fusco, “On- line Simulations,” 154.

59. Quoted in Meikle, Future Active, 170.

60. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York:

Random House, 1978), 96. Louise Amoore has written on the momentary aspect of

dissent in the Foucauldian tradition specifically in relation to biometric borders and

the regulation of the movement of people. See her “Biometric Borders: Governing

Mobilities in the War on Terror,” Political Geography 25 (2006) 336–51. She has also

written brilliantly of the impossible ideality of the great refusal, which promises a sin-

gular, cohesive, and locatable enemy. See “ ‘There Is No Great Refusal’: The Ambiva-

lent Politics of Resistance,” in International Political Economy and Poststructural

Politics, ed. Marieke de Goede (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 255–74.

NoteS­to­cHapter­1164

61. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance, 130. Dominguez, cited in

McKenzie and Schneider, “Critical Art Ensemble,” 139.

62. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance, 24. McKenzie and Schneider,

“Critical Art Ensemble,” 139.

63. Lovink, Nettime post, May 16, 1997.

64. Also see Lovink, Dark Fiber, 264.

65. Vilém Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, trans.

Kennett Kronenberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 106.

66. Cited in Amy Carroll, “Incumbent upon Recombinant Hope,” TDR: The Drama

Review 47, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 147.

67. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance, 120.

68. Rhizome project description, http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?4069.

69. http://noborder.org/about.php.

70. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 328–29.

71. http://stopgatekeeper.org/English/deaths.htm.

72. See http://www.treborscholz.squarespace.com/tuesday- afternoon.

73. The incorporation of a first- person voice or perspective is by no means absent

in the art and literature of the Chicano migrant experience. As just one example,

Tomás Rivera’s oral narrative . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra / . . . And the Earth Did Not

Devour Him (1970) incorporates the voices of Mexican American migrant workers of

the 1940s and 1950s through internal monologue.

74. “BorderXing Guide,” Tate Online (November 23, 2004), http://w w w.tate.org

.uk/netart/borderxing. See http://irational.org/cgi- bin/border/clients/deny.pl. Also

see Benedict Seymour, “Real Politik versus Real Fantasy: Review of the Tate Mod-

ern’s Border Crossing Seminar,” Metamute, January 2002.

75. “Border Crossings,” Tate seminar (October 1, 2002), http://www.tate.org.uk/

onlineevents/archive/border_crossings.

76. See http://status.irational.org.

77. Elizabeth Bard, “How to Cross Borders, Social or Otherwise,” New York Times,

October 27, 2004, http://tech.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/arts/design/27iden.html.

78. “Interventions / Artist - Judi Werthein / Brinco (Jump),” inSite_05 (August 28,

2005), http://www.insite05.org/internal.php?pid=7- 214.

79. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 213, 212.

80. Balibar, “Europe,” 42.

81. For Hardt and Negri’s noted treatment of Bartleby as a figure of refusal, see

Empire, 203–4.

82. Balibar’s thinking here echoes his treatment of “the right to have rights” in

We the People of Europe?

83. Flusser, Freedom of the Migrant, 22.

84. There is a certain correlation here between Flusser and Hannah Arendt’s

treatment of refugees in the post–World War II period in that she, too, speaks to the

NoteS­to­cHapter­1 165

political community (the nation- state) as the guarantor of rights. Further, she notes

that refugees are not produced by an event; rather, they take on that status through

their relation with a sovereign state. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitari­

anism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).

85. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York:

Routledge, 2004), 193.

86. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 13.

87. Quoted in Marketou, “Where Do We Go.”

88. See, for example, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995).

89. “Tijuana Calling/Llamando Tijuana,” inSite _05, curated by Mark Tribe (No-

vember 5, 2005), http://www.insite05.org/auxillary/tjcalling2.htm.

90. See http://www.turistafronterizo.net.

91. Installing the gamebox at the EZLN headquarters was for Dominguez a cru-

cial component of the Turista project, though it meant working against the notion

that the net.art component of inSite_05 be strictly digital. The gesture of technology

transfer formed a circuit “from material society to immaterial society and back if you

will.” Personal e- mail communication with Dominguez, May 30–31, 2006.

92. For a partial overview of some of these games, see <re:Play>, http://w w w

.radioqualia.net/replay/players.html.

93. See http://www.sudor.net/games/crosser_lamigra/index.html.

94. See http://www.borderfilmproject.com.

95. See http://www.sudor.net/games/crosser_lamigra/index.html.

96. My discussion of the corrido is informed by Américo Paredes, “With His Pis­

tol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press,

1958); and Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1990), 26–45.

97. See http://w w w.ungravity.org/corridos/htm/situation.htm. I have not al-

tered any of the spelling or capitalization in the passage.

98. Andreas, Border Games, x.

99. I have standardized the capitalization for legibility. See http://post.thing

.net/node/619.

100. Hernandez comments on his detention in a post at SWEATblog (Novem-

ber 23, 2005): “We don’t want to be part of a witch hunt in which artists are the target

of organizations such as the above mentioned, and showing some knowledge about

the life in the border is considered to hide information on terrorism.” http://www

.sudor.net/blog/archive/2005/10/corridos_at_ins.html.

101. For details on Kurtz’s case, see Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund, http://

www.caedefensefund.org.

102. Rebecca Schneider and Jon McKenzie, “Keep your EYES on the FRONT and

WATCH YOUR BACK,” TDR: The Drama Review 48, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 9.

103. There are echoes of Bunting and Brandon’s Status Project here, in that both

166 NoteS­to­cHapter­2

are imagined to aid and abet activities that putatively threaten U.S. national security,

whether it be the changing of legal identity or the support of a criminal- terrorist or-

ganization operating literally underground at the U.S.–Mexico border. That Hernan-

dez explained that all of the factual information in the game derived from published

sources matters little once we remember that the FBI is accustomed to studying con-

temporary art for clues to terrorist networks. (After 9/11, the FBI contacted the Whit-

ney to see Mark Lombardi’s last work, BCCI, ICIC & FAB [1996–2000].)

104. For a more detailed commentary on risk management in the context of the

war on terror, see de Goede and Amoore’s introduction to their coedited volume Gov­

erning by Risk in a Time of Terror (New York: Routledge, 2008).

105. Similarly, in his SWARM chronology, Stefan Wray offers critical aware-

ness as a kind of “third way,” neither cynicism nor conformity: “To show the world

what is / Really happening— to have a critical worldview and to become / Interested

in the truth of what happens to the people of this World.” http://web.archive.org/

web/20021021081320/http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/CHRON.html.

2. Virtual War

1. Lappé and Goldman, Shooting War (May 2006–), SMITH Magazine, chap-

ters 2.13 and 3.3, http://smithmag.us/shootingwar.

2. http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/chapters/chapter- 6/5.

3. http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/chapters/chapter- 5/8.

4. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

5. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cam-

bridge: Blackwell, 1992), 175.

6. Ibid., 179; William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1986), 5, 51.

7. See, for example, Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

8. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military­ Industrial­ Media­

Entertainment Network (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001). Also see Tim Lenoir,

“All but War Is Simulation: The Military- Entertainment Complex,” Configurations

8 (2000): 289–335; and the research initiative InfoTechWarPeace started by Der

Derian at the Watson Institute, Brown University, http://www.watsoninstitute.org/

infopeace/index2.cfm.

9. “9.11: Before, After, and in Between,” http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/der_

derian.htm.

10. See, for example, “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the Neal Boortz Show,” No-

vember 29, 2005, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2005/tr20051129- secdef4381.

html; and Jim Garamone, “Rumsfeld Speaks on Process behind Budget, Q DR,” Feb-

ruary 7, 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2006/20060207_4137.html.

167NoteS­to­cHapter­2

11. See John Lasker, “U.S. Military’s Elite Hacker Crew,” Wired, April 18, 2005,

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67223,00.html; and “The Hackers You

Haven’t Heard About,” Salon, http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2005/04/19/

hack/index.html.

12. See http://www.oft.osd.mil.

13. Tim Blackmore, War X: Human Extensions in Battlespace (Toronto: Univer-

sity of Toronto Press, 2005), 5.

14. William S. Lind et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Genera-

tion,” Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989, http://w w w.d- n- i.net/fcs/4th_gen_war_

gazette.htm. Also see “Fourth Generation Warfare,” Defense and the National In­

terest, December 24, 2005, http://w w w.d- n- i.net/second_level/fourth_generation_

warfare.htm.

15. Jose Antonio Vargas, “A ‘Sim’ That’s Dead Serious,” Washington Post, April 13,

2005, C1. Also see the archives of DefenseTech.org (Noah Shachtman, ed.).

16. Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone

Books, 1991), 95. For an historical overview of war games leading up to late- twentieth-

century nuclear scenarios, see Thomas B. Allen, War Games: The Secret World of the

Creators, Players, and Policy Makers Rehearsing World War III Today (New York:

McGraw- Hill, 1987).

17. Julian Borger, “Wake- Up Call,” Guardian, September 6, 2002. Alex Dragulescu

has produced a visualization of the Millennium Challenge; see http://www.sq.ro/

havoc.php.

18. Official Tactical Iraqi site, http://www.tacticallanguage.com/tacticaliraqi.

Elizabeth Losh, “In Country with Tactical Iraqi: Trust, Identity, and Language Learn-

ing in a Military Video Game,” Proceedings of the Sixth Digital Arts and Culture

Conference (2005), http://eee.uci.edu/faculty/losh/virtualpolitik/DAC_Presentation

.html. Also see Paul Rincon, “U.S. Troops Taught Iraqi Gestures,” BBC, February 19, 2006,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4729262.stm; Gretchen Cuda, “Troops Learn

Not to Offend,” Wired, April 11, 2006, http://w w w.wired.com/news/technology/

0,70576- 0.html?tw=wn_culture_1. On the Human Terrain System (HTS) program,

see David Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” New York Times, Oc-

tober 5, 2007.

19. See http://w w w.darwars.net/systems/; http://vector.chisystems.com; and

http://www.forterrainc.com.

20. Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991).

So, too, one could suggest that the presence of nonstate actors means that it is no lon-

ger a war per se. This is no minor rhetorical point: “war” provides a certain ideologi-

cal cover necessary to our not seeing that it has become an occupation.

21. For Robb’s account of global guerrilla warfare, see Brave New War: The Next

Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007), along

with http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com.

168 NoteS­to­cHapter­2

22. http://www.videoactivism.org/empire.html.

23. The TXTMob service was developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy

and used for protests during both the Democratic and Republican conventions in

2004. See http://www.appliedautonomy.com/txtmob/txtmobPR2.html.

24. Becky Worley, “Hacktivists Promote War Messages,” G4: TechTV Vault, April 9,

2003, http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/44250/Hacktivists_Promote_War_

Messages.html.

25. Richard Brennan, Protecting the Homeland: Insights from Army Wargames

(Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 2002), 19–20.

26. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report (2004), 157–58, http://w w w.9- 11commission.gov/report/

911Report.pdf.

27. Cyber- terrorism and cyber- security have received notable fictional treatment

in Dan Verton, Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyber­ Terrorism, a journalistic ac-

count that opens with a somewhat sensational futurist narrative (Emeryville, Calif.:

McGraw- Hill Osborne Media, 2003), and in Bruce Sterling’s The Zenith Angle, his

9/11 novel (New York: Del Ray, 2004).

28. On the topic of terrorist use of the Internet, with a focus on communication,

publicity, and information gathering, see Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet:

The New Arena, the New Challenges (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of

Peace Press, 2006). Also see the affiliated report, “How Modern Terrorism Uses the

Internet,” hosted by the United States Institute of Peace, http://www.usip.org/pubs/

specialreports/sr116.html.

29. Panel 1 of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee (May 4,

2006), 1. Transcript available from “Mediawatch: Video Game Jihad,” ABC Tele-

vision, http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1644639.htm.

30. Retrieved from ZDNet (May 5, 2006), http://news.zdnet.com/2100- 1040_

22- 6068963.html. See the discussion of this incident at Water Cooler Games (May 12,

2006), http://www.watercoolergames.org/archives/000556.shtml.

31. The transcript of the hearings does not indicate how much of the eleven- minute

film the panel watched, but Morgan’s account indicates that they made it through the

first two minutes at the minimum.

32. Ben Kuchera, “Fan- Made Battlefield 2 Video Mistaken for Terrorist Propa-

ganda,” Ars Technica, May 7, 2006, http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/

5/7/3874.

33. http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,130.0.html. SonicJihad took his

board name from the hip- hop album by Paris (2003), the cover of which depicts a

plane flying into the White House. Paris is perhaps best known for the controversial

1992 track “Bush Killa,” a self- styled “revenge fantasy about the assassination of then-

president George Bush (Sr.) for neglect of poor conditions in oppressed communities

nationwide.” http://www.guerrillafunk.com/paris/sleeping_with_the_enemy.

169NoteS­to­cHapter­2

34. http://w w w.forumplanet.com/planetbattlef ield/topic.asp?f id=13670& tid=

1806909&p=1.

35. Ibid.

36. http://gamepolitics.livejournal.com/285129.html.

37. Panel 1 of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee (May 4,

2006), 4.

38. Ibid., 17.

39. http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q- and- a- fetch- msg?msg_id=0000YU&

topic_id=1.

40. Panel 1 of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee (May 4,

2006), 4.

41. George W. Bush, “Introduction,” The National Security Strategy of the United

States of America (September 2002), http://w w w.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2002/

index.html.

42. Panel 1 of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee (May 4,

2006), 21.

43. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

44. Panel 1 of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee (May 4,

2006), 8.

45. Personal e- mail from Venable Barry to Sara Willett (May 20, 2006), “Video

Game Jihad,” Media Watch, http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1644639

.htm.

46. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The

9/11 Commission Report (2004), 157–58, http://w w w.9- 11commission.gov/report/

911Report.pdf.

47. Friedman, “Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide,” New York Times, July

22, 2005, A- 19.

48. Chris Suellentrop, “The War on Terror’s Least- Frightening Video Games,”

Slate, August 12, 2005, http://www.slate.com/id/2124363/. Islamgames defines the

player’s mission: “As a member of the Intergalactic Muslim Council (IGMC), your

job is to help coordinate Dawa efforts on other planets. You couldn’t be happier with

your work, until the Flying Evil Robot Armada (FERM) attacks your home planet of

Earth. It seems there was one disbeliever, known as Abu Lahab XVIII, left on Earth,

and in his desperate attempt to deny the truth of Islam, he has constructed a whole

army of robots to destroy the Earth and all of its Muslims.” http://islamgames.com/

ud1.html.

49. Galloway, Gaming, 78.

50. See http://w w w.specialforce.net/english/indexeng.htm. See http://w w w

.underash.net/eshots.htm. The sequel to this game, Under Siege, is available in demo

version from http://www.underash.net/en_download.htm. See Kim Ghattas, “Syria

170 NoteS­to­cHapter­2

launches Arab war game,” BBC News, May 31, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/

middle_east/2019677.stm.

51. http://www.boefivgt.org.uk/signs.htm.

52. Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online

Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 231.

53. http://www.boefivgt.org.uk/threat2.htm.

54. See Antony Barnett, “Islamic Rappers’ Message of Terror,” Observer, Febru-

ary 8, 2004, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/redbox/story/0,9029,1143691,00.html.

55. http://www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/the_games.htm. For a thorough ac-

count of Left Behind Games and Left Behind: Eternal Forces, see Jonathan Hudson’s

six- part series at Talk to Action, May 29–June 21, 2006, http://www.talk2action.org/

story/2006/5/29/195855/959.

56. For design, development, and audience information see Margaret Davis, ed.,

America’s Army PC Game: Vision and Realization (San Francisco: Yerba Buena

Art Center, 2004). On America’s Army and the military- entertainment complex,

see Timothy Lenoir, “Programming Theaters of War: Gamemakers as Soldiers,” in

Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship between IT and Security, ed.

Robert Latham (New York: New Press, 2003), and “Fashioning the Military Enter-

tainment Complex,” Correspondence: An International Review of Culture and Soci­

ety 10 (Winter–Spring 2002–3): 14–16. Related games include the commercial, U.S.

Army- sponsored Full Spectrum Warrior and Soldier of Fortune, which has a modi-

fied Quake II engine.

57. Alfred Hermida, “War Vets Feature in U.S. Army Game,” BBC News, May 18,

2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4991306.stm. America’s Army: Special

Forces (Overmatch) (scheduled for release in summer 2006) will feature the stories

of nine soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan in a special “heroes section,”

with the sale of plastic soldiers as a tie- in to the game.

58. Der Derian, Antidiplomacy, 183.

59. Bruce Sterling, “War Is Virtual Hell,” Wired, March–April 1993, http://www

.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/virthell.html?topic=&topic%20set=;.

60. Although Naisbitt’s primary concern is the U.S. “culture of violence” and the

relations between first- person shooters such as Doom and material events such as the

Columbine shooting, he also addresses Marine Doom and the extent to which mili-

tary simulation training imbricates function and play. See John Naisbitt, High Tech/

High Touch (New York: Broadway, 1999), 65–112.

61. For critical commentary and historical overview of the toywar, see Graham

Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002),

168–72; and Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler, Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs.

eToys.com and Other Battles to Control Cyberspace (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

62. Dominguez, quoted in Meikle, Future Active, 170.

63. An overview of these games is available from the <re:Play> exhibit, http://

www.radioqualia.net/replay/players.html. Also see Daniel Terdiman, “Playing Games

171NoteS­to­cHapter­2

with a Conscience,” Wired, April 22, 2004; and the Activism Games archive at http://

www.watercoolergames.org/archives/cat_activism_games.shtml.

64. Ian Bogost, “They Rule: Videogames with an Agenda,” didactic from the ex-

hibit at London Curzon Soho (October 2004), curated by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo

Frasca.

65. On play as activism and activism as play, see Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source

Democracy (2003).

66. Ian Bogost, Michael Mateas, Janet Murray, and Michael Nitsche, “Asking

What Is Possible: The Georgia Tech Approach to Game Research and Education,”

International Digital Media and Arts Association Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 63.

67. See Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).

68. http://www.agoraxchange.net/index.php?page=218.

69. http://www.newsgaming.com.

70. William S. Lind, “On War #171: Aaugh!” Defense and the National Interest,

June 19, 2006, http://www.d- n- i.net/lind/lind_6_19_06.htm.

71. http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm.

72. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Ca-

miller (New York: Verso, 1989).

73. http://w w w.uzinagaz.com/index.php?entry_point=w tc. It was followed by

Baghdad Defender (2003), in which players defend the city against incoming missiles.

74. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=40095.

75. We might also consider the first- person shooter in this regard in light of Chris

Crawford’s commentary on Space Invaders as a metaphor for the subject’s frustra-

tion: “All the social rules and institutions are arrayed against us; they march in lock-

step as they threaten to suffocate us. They rain their nasty poop onto our heads; we

can only dodge them. But we do have one gun with which to shoot back, and if we

dodge quickly, we can defeat them. It’s a compelling metaphor for the predicament

with which we all struggle; that’s why it was such a huge success.” Crawford, On Game

Design (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2003), 30.

76. http://w w w.brand.co.il/unik/westbank. “Disengagement, the Video Game”

Ynetnews, June 11, 2005, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L- 3097902,00

.html; Ian Bogost, “Israeli Anti- Settlement Game,” Water Cooler Games, June 17,

2005, http://www.watercoolergames.org/archives/000420.shtml.

77. For commentary on no- win games, see Shuen- shing Lee, “ ‘I Lose, Therefore I

Think’: A Search for Contemplation amid Wars of Push- Button Glare,” Game Studies

3 no. 2 (December 2003): http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/lee.

78. Bogost poses a similar question about the representation of conflict in game

spaces: “What portion of revolutions can escape historical, cultural, and regional

speci ficity enough to be computationally modeled?” See http://www.watercoolergames

.org/archives/000371.shtml.

79. http://www.antiwargame.org.

172 NoteS­to­cHapter­2

80. For a detailed discussion of ergodic texts, those that require the reader to

engage in significant physical activity, see Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on

Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

81. See http://www.cityarts.com/iraq/index.html.

82. See http://www.thegreatgame.com.

83. Many of his works are modeled on the gaming multiuser environment, but

his mode is one of borrowing rather than of foundational research. That is, he uses

algorithms operative in gaming environments, but his own programming is unlikely

to be reinvented or applied for commercial, industrial interests in the future.

84. http://www.cityarts.com/lmno.

85. Blackhawk, “John Klima: Shrinking Afghanistan,” October 2001, http://www

.cityarts.com/shrink/crit.html.

86. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso,

2000), 9.

87. See http://www.cityarts.com/lmno/postmasters.html.

88. I am indebted to Russell Samolsky for his insights about Matisse and Klima.

89. Emily Apter, “The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats,” October 99 (Winter 2002):

42.

90. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 21.

91. One could also point to the controversy over claims that the images of torture

and atrocity are a form of artistic production, specifically the journalist’s misunder-

standing about Karlheinz Stockhausen’s comments on the destruction of the Twin

Towers as a work of art. See http://www.stockhausen.org/message_from_karlheinz

.html.

92. Judith Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” PML A 120, no. 3 (2005): 824.

93. Jordan Crandall, “On Warfare and Representation,” in Under Fire: The Or­

ganization and Representation of Violence, ed. Jordan Crandall (Rotterdam: Witte

de With, 2004), 218.

94. http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns011.

95. Alyssa Wright, Cherry Blossoms, http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Ealyssa/about

.html.

96. “Battle Plan under Fire,” Nova, May 2004, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/

wartech.

97. Cited in William Merrin, “Total Screen: 9/11 and the Gulf War Reloaded,”

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2, no. 2 (July 2005).

98. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press,

2004), 31.

99. http://www.obleek.com/iraq.

100. Joseph DeLappe, dead­ in­ Iraq, http://www.unr.edu/art/DELAPPE/Gaming/

Dead_In_Iraq/dead_in_iraq%20JPEGS.html.

101. See Karen DeYoung, “Experts Doubt Drop in Violence in Iraq Military Statis-

tics Called into Question,” Washington Post, September 6, 2007, A16.

173NoteS­to­cHapter­3

102. James Der Derian, “War as Game,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 10, no. 1

(2003): 39–40.

103. DeLappe regards “the ongoing spread of information regarding this work as

part of the work.” “Dead- in- iraq,” Terra Nova comment thread, May 5, 2006, http://

terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/05/deadiniraq_.html. The rage directed to-

ward DeLappe is also present in online gaming forums such as WomenGamers. As we

saw with the SonicJihad video, forum commentators are among the most intensely

critical of objects and performances enacted within their particular communities.

104. One paradox is that America’s Army is already modeled on the real, particu-

larly in the forthcoming Special Forces edition, which is designed to “put a human

face on the war.”

105. Galloway, Gaming, 115–25.

106. http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet- strike/about.html.

107. They outline the project in the following terms: “By f inding representations

and processes to stimulate the desires that the enriched privation of product con-

sumption and alienated labor cannot, tactical media practitioners can help children

visualize the possibilities that are withheld from them, and to realize these possi-

bilities in language and performance.” http://w w w.carbondefense.org/writing_4

.html. Video documentation available from http://w w w.carbondefense.org/video/

Child AsParticipant.mov.

108. Kathleen Craig, “Dead in Iraq: It’s No Game,” Wired, June 6, 2006, http://

www.wired.com/news/culture/games/0,71052- 0.html?m_E; and Li C. Kuo, “A New

Kind of Art Form Leads to a New Kind of Protest,” GameSpy, May 23, 2006, http://

www.gamespy.com/pc/americas- army/709854p1.html.

109. See James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After­ images of the Holocaust in Con­

temporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

110. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning

(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 7.

3. Speculative Capital

The chapter epigraph is from Manuel De Landa, “Markets, Antimarkets, and Net-

work Economics” (1996), http://w w w.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/edelanda.html.

1. Global Clock No. 1 was exhibited as part of The Fifth Element, Art or Money,

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (January–May 2000). Global Clock No. 2 was exhibited at the

Swiss National Exhibition (2002). See Short Circuit, a.k.a. Global Clock, http://www

.l00k.org/globalclock1/global- clock.

2. Kurgan, Global Clock, http://www.l00k.org/clock_project/clockinfo.htm.

3. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Au-

tumn 1997): 260.

4. http://www.l00k.org/clock_project/clockinfo.htm.

5. Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, http://www.blackshoals.net.

174 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

6. Julian Stallabrass makes a similar point in “A View from the Fish Tank,” in

Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium (Copenhagen: Nikolaj Contemporary Art

Center, 2004), chap. 4, n.p.

7. Cefn Hoile, “Black Shoals: Evolving Organisms in a World of Financial Data,”

in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, chap. 5, n.p.

8. See Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The

Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York: Portfolio, 2003).

9. Wattenberg, Map of the Market, http://smartmoney.com/marketmap. What

is the relation, further, between visualizations of financial information and the proj-

ects that make art out of banknotes and coins, Warhol, Beuys, Paolo Monti, and Otis

Kaye? What are the abstractions in each? How would the issue of reference and the

content of the reference differ? To start, Otis Kaye’s early- twentieth- century trompe

l’oeil paintings of U.S. currency are representational rather than simulational. Un-

like the earlier trompe l’oeil paintings of William Harnett and John Haberle, which

were confiscated by the Secret Service on the basis of their violation of counterfeit

laws, and unlike the notorious transactional performances of J. S. G. Boggs in the

1980s and early 1990s, Kaye’s work foregrounds composition instead of reproduction.

Though Kaye’s technique also produces a hyperrealism, his paintings maintain a col-

lage effect through the superimposition of coins, bank notes, and text over fragments

of replicated “masters” paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, Goya, Dürer, Picasso,

and Whistler. See the catalog from the Federal Reserve Board exhibition, by Otis

Kaye (New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2002); as well as Lawrence Weschler, Boggs:

A Comedy of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Also see Warhol’s

Eighty Two­ Dollar­ Bills (1962); Monti’s Dollar Image (1989) and Cash (1991), at

http://www.uni- konstanz.de/FuF/wiwi/laufer/index- 2.htm; and Kaye’s trompe l’oeil

works, some at http://www.otiskaye.com.

10. Cefn Hoile paper also available from http://blackshoals.net/ALife.html.

11. http://www.reas.com.

12. Manuel De Landa, “Markets, Antimarkets, and Network Economics,” n.p.

13. Hardt and Negri argue that capital can only be reactive; the proletariat “actu-

ally invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the

future.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2000), 268.

14. Sylvère Lotringer, introduction to The Grammar of the Multitude, by Paolo

Virno, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 12.

15. Olav Velthuis, Imaginary Economics: Contemporary Artists and the World of

Big Money (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2005), 13.

16. Spencer E. Ante, “A Digital Artist’s Portrait of Economic Darwinism,” Busi­

ness Week, June 6, 2001, http://www.businessweek.com:/print/technology/content/

jun2001/tc2001066_336.htm?eb.

17. John Klima, ecosystm, http://www.cityarts.com/lmno/ecosystm.html.

175NoteS­to­cHapter­3

18. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and

the Economic World (Reading, Mass.: Addison- Wesley, 1994); David R. Henderson,

“Survival of the Fittest,” Red Herring, December 1997, http://redherring.com/mag/

issue49/school.html; Evan I. Schwartz, Digital Darwinism (New York: Broadway

Books, 2001); Eric A. Marks, Business Darwinism: Evolve or Dissolve (New York:

John Wiley and Sons, 2002).

19. On the many challenges to territorial currencies, see Eric Helleiner, The Mak­

ing of National Money (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 5–12, 218–44.

We might also see a connection here to Friedrich Hayek’s theses toward the “dena-

tionalisation of money” (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976), cited as one of

the major influences on neoliberal economic policy makers.

20. Klima, “ecosystm,” http://www.cityarts.com/lmno/ecosystm.html.

21. Emily Apter, “The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats,” October 99 (Winter 2002):

39.

22. “The Update! Documents” (March 2002), http://www.treasurecrumbs.com/

theupgrade/02_2klima.html.

23. In Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes (Vancouver Art Gallery, 1997), Allan

Sekula writes at length about the design of the Bank of Canada, addressing in par-

ticular the significance of the elaborate botanical garden court as an enforced link

between the money in the bank and Canada’s natural resources.

24. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso,

2000), 13.

25. My thinking here is also informed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing

Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), particularly his reading of

historical time as “out of joint with itself ” (16).

26. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32, 209.

27. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990,

trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 180.

28. Ibid., 172. Also see F. U. Rosenberger, “Metastability” (April 4, 2001), http://

www.cse.wustl.edu/~fred/CLASSES/463FA02/Metastability.pdf. I can only gesture

toward the relations between eighteenth- and nineteenth- century liberal doctrines

of economic liberty (Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spen-

cer) on the one hand and the contemporary neoliberal free- trade, antiregulation

cult of the individual on the other. But it is worth generally noting in this context

that Smith’s reaction against prior mercantilist control of the economy by the state

held that economics were best left to operate under their own natural laws without

government interference and regulation of free competition. His theological view of

markets imagined them as self- regulating and tending toward an equilibrium of sup-

ply and demand, its invisible hand allowing it to achieve its own natural efficiency.

We move then from equilibrium to metastability.

29. Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” 251.

176 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

30. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Ori­

gins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 2.

31. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York:

Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 87.

32. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 3rd ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and

David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 2004), 510–11.

33. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 4.

34. Wriston, quoted in Thomas A. Bass, “The Future of Money,” Wired 4, no. 10

(October 1996), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.10/wriston.html.

35. Jerry Harris, “Globalisation and the Technological Transformation of Capital-

ism,” Race and Class 40, nos. 2–3 (1998–99): 34.

36. Sean Cubitt, “Orbus Tertius,” Third Text, Summer 1999, 8–9.

37. Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” 246–65.

38. Ibid., 260.

39. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii.

40. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 349–50.

41. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Richter Verlag, 1995), 202.

42. Ibid., 12.

43. Allan Sekula, “Freeway to China,” in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture

of Neoliberalism, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 2001), 150; and Sekula, Fish Story, 12.

44. Zillah Eisenstein, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of

Cyberfantasy (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 7.

45. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd. ed. (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 350.

46. Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift, Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary

Transformation (New York: Routledge, 1997).

47. Virilio, The Information Bomb, 9.

48. The dialectic of materiality and abstraction in this art project might profitably

be compared to the K Foundation’s burning of a million pounds on the island of Jura

off the west coast of Scotland on August 23, 1994. See Chris Brook, ed., K Foundation

Burn a Million Quid (London: Ellipsis, 1997); and http://www.ellipsis.com/k.

49. See http://w w w.olapehrson.com/index/yucca/index.html. Peter Stallabrass

discusses Pehrson’s plant in Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce

(London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 31.

50. Commentary on Pehrson’s work for the Best Before exhibition at the Associa-

tion for Temporary Art, Sweden (1999). Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/

20021225043440/http://www.art.a.se/best_before/about.

51. Paul H. Cootner’s edited volume The Random Character of Stock Market Prices

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964) includes the Bachelier thesis as well as litera-

ture on efficient markets and the efficient- market hypothesis (EMH).

177NoteS­to­cHapter­3

52. For example, P. S. Seward’s Technique of Speculation (London: Sir Isaac Pit-

man and Sons, 1929) claims that “it [the stock exchange] is as legitimate a market

as any other, possessing a definite scientific technique peculiarly its own” (preface).

Seward advocates that investors eliminate uncertainty by “careful study of infor-

mation and statistics” (13) and thereby suggests that market pricing has a kind of

rationality, rather than an unpredictability, to it. Philip L. Carret’s The Art of Spec­

ulation (1930; New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997) links the two definitions of

speculation— intellectual examination and trading— to claim that market fluctua-

tions can be studied rationally and speculative investment strategies intelligently

outlined.

53. Paul H. Cootner, ed., The Random Character of Stock Market Prices (1964;

London: Financial Engineering Ltd. edition, 2000), 123.

54. Ibid., xi.

55. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 55.

56. Eric Hobsbawm speaks of a short twentieth century (1914–91) abbreviated by

two decades of crisis and culminating in the collapse of communist regimes and sub-

sequent political instability and uncertainty. See Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A

History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994), 10–11. Similarly, Waller-

stein designates 1989 as the end of the modern world system begun in the “long”

sixteenth century; see The End of the World as We Know It (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1999).

57. Karl Marx, Capital: An Abridged Edition, ed. David McLellan (New York: Ox-

ford University Press, 1995), 98.

58. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books,

1973), 537.

59. Ibid., 548–49; Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” 251.

60. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper

Torchbooks, 1962), 83. For a comparison of Schumpeter and Marx’s views of capital-

ism’s future, see John E. Elliott, “Marx and Schumpeter on Capitalism’s Creative De-

struction: A Comparative Restatement,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 95, no. 1

(August 1980): 45–68.

61. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 83.

62. See J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark

Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

63. Marx, Capital, 99. Another link can be made to Ricardo’s concept of the “or-

ganic structure of capital,” which, according to Schumpeter, concerns the relation

between “constant and variable capital” (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 26).

Though it is not concerned with Marx or this passage, extended commentary on the

representation of the Jewish body and circumcision as a “marker” of incompleteness,

identity, and difference “within the parameters of ‘healthy’ or ‘diseased’ ” can be found

in Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 155.

64. Among the many subsequent exegeses of Capital on this point, see Benjamin

178 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

Lee and Edward LiPuma on capital’s “self- propelling treadmill structure” and the

economy as “an autonomous, self- regulating system.” “Cultures of Circulation: The

Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 208. Also see Robert

Heilbroner: “Capitalism’s most striking historical characteristic is its extraordinary

propensity for self- generated change.” Heilbroner, Twenty­ First Century Capitalism

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 41.

65. Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern

World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 10. Their discus-

sion of “a dominant state [that] becomes the ‘model’ for other states to emulate and

thereby draws them into its own path of development” (27) follows the critical path

of Gramsci on hegemony and George Modelski and William R. Thompson (1995).

With respect to the reconfiguration of the function of the state vis- à- vis contempo-

rary capitalism, Jerry Harris also notes, “[Transnationals use] government to help

penetrate new markets, keep labour and environmental costs low and subsidise their

global activities. This is not the disappearance of states, but the redefinition of their

role” (“Globalisation and the Technological Transformation of Capitalism,” 33).

66. Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” 249.

67. Michael Pryke and George Allen, “Monetized Time- Space: Derivatives— Money’s

‘New Imaginary’?” Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (May 2000): 270. Similarly, see

RTMark’s commentary on corporate power as a virus: “The flexibility of corporate

power, its lack of a center, comes at a price: it has no brain. It may be as tenacious

as a virus, but it also has the intelligence of one: mechanical, soulless, minuscule.”

“Sabotage and the New World Order,” in InfoWar, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine

Schöpf (Vienna: Springer, 1998), 242.

68. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 41.

69. Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism (London:

Futura Publications, 1992), xi, xv. Also see Eric Drexler on corporations as “evolved

artificial systems” that emerge from the competitive Darwinian marketplace in his

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor Books,

1874).

70. De Landa, “Markets, Antimarkets, and Network Economics,” n.p.

71. Rothschild, Bionomics, xiii. Essentially this is a kind of social Darwinism, as

Paulina Borsook also notes: “The idea is that if the market does not validate your

ideas, you are inferior intellectually.” “Cyberselfishness Explained: An Interview with

Paulina Borsook,” in Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia,

by Geert Lovink (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 338–39. Also see Konrad

Becker’s commentary on the “revival of 19th century ‘adapt- or- perish’ ideolog y,”

World- Infostructure, http://www.t0.or.at/wio/wisintro/html/3/es.htm.

72. J. K. Gibson- Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Cambridge:

Blackwell, 1996), 253–65.

73. Kathleen Woodward also notes the prevalence of the biological metaphor in

179NoteS­to­cHapter­3

1970s analyses of the self- replicating quality of information, partly beginning with

Daniel Bell’s commentary on information as that which reproduces itself: “Under-

lying the process of the reproduction of information are metaphors drawn from bi-

ology and fission, both of which proceed at an exponential rate. . . . We speak of an

information explosion that triggers an ever- accelerating growth in information.”

Woodward, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Lon-

don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), xv.

74. Gibson- Graham, End of Capitalism, 117.

75. Otto Imken, “The Convergence of Virtual and Actual in the Global Matrix,” in

Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations, ed. Mike Crang, Phil Crang, and

Jon May (New York: Routledge, 1999), 100–101. This point would for Žižek likely serve

as confirmation of his argument that Deleuze has emerged as the premier ideologist

of global capitalism (Žižek, Organs without Bodies).

76. Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without

Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 312.

77. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945).

78. Clearing House Interbank Payments Company, CHIPCo, http://www.chips.org.

In The Twilight of Sovereignty (1992), Walter Wriston makes a representative com-

ment on the extent to which the telecom network began radically transforming the

global financial markets with the introduction of Reuters’s video terminal, “Monitor,”

in 1973; see The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Trans­

forming Our World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), esp. 40–42, 59–61.

79. See Marieke de Goede’s important work on the war on terrorist finance, e.g.,

“Underground Money,” Cultural Critique 65 (2007): 140–63.

80. With regard to regulation, Masao Miyoshi briefly considers the role of CHIPS

in relation to the weakened power of national banks. Miyoshi, “A Borderless World?

From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation- State,” Criti­

cal Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 726–51. On the theme of self- facilitation, Geoffrey

Ingham notes that “circuits of economic exchange obviously have been able to create

their own media of exchange.” Payment systems, in other words, require a network,

hardware, and software. Ingham, “New Monetary Spaces?” The Future of Money

(Paris: Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development, 2002), 139.

81. Pryke and Allen, “Monetized Time- Space,” 270.

82. Jean- Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation­ State, trans. Victoria Elliott

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 54. Also see Richard J. Barnet

and John Cavanagh’s discussion of “money without a home” in their Global Dreams:

Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1994), 385–402. Employing a somewhat literal definition of the deterritorial in their

discussion of financial markets and monetized time- space, Pryke and Allen conclude

that money “has become increasingly deterritorialized . . . as previously separate

180 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

financial markets have lost their regulatory and geographical distinction” (“Mone-

tized Time- Space,” 282). In response, much contemporary work on global capital

markets and the hazards of derivatives calls for the international and national regu-

lation of speculative trading, e.g., Adam Tickell, “Dangerous Derivatives: Controlling

and Creating Risks in International Money,” Geoforum 31 (2000): 87–99.

83. In The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells notes that “one of the key

features of informational society is the networking logic of its basic structure” (21).

Barnet and Cavanagh cite the New York Times writer Peter Passell on the reliance of

global banking and financial systems on electronic communications networks. Passell

also uses the language of the body to characterize the operation of the network: it is

“the computer system that is the heart of global capitalism” (Barnet and Cavanagh,

Global Dreams, 387). Leyshon and Thrift use the same metaphor but figure the city

of London as the electronic “heart” of the “international imperium of commercial

capital” (Money/Space, 336).

84. Jean- François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1984), 67.

85. By extending speech- act theory to economic practices, Lee and LiPuma inves-

tigate the performativity of capital.

86. Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand,

1964), http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html. Also see Alexander Gal-

loway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 2006), 30–35.

87. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems,

and the Economic World (Cambridge, Mass., Perseus, 1995), 3. Nicholas Negroponte,

Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996), 181. For an overview of the “wired” 1990s,

see Thomas Streeter, “The Moment of Wired,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (Summer

2005): 755–79.

88. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Infor­

mation Society to the Virtual Life (New York: Routledge 1999), 69–70.

89. Kelly, Out of Control, 25. Terranova, “Digital Darwin: Nature, Evolution, and

Control in the Rhetoric of Electronic Communication,” New Formations 29 (Autumn

1996): 70. A compelling counterpart to the figure of the “nest of snakes” is Ben Fry’s

“organic information design,” for example, Anemone, which envisions information as

a complex, biological system that is both interactive and emergent. Here the nodes of

data are analogized to creatures in an ecosystem and grow or atrophy depending on

user engagement and their relations with other nodes. See http://acg.media.mit.edu/

people/fry/anemone.

90. For an in- depth analysis of the debates about the Clipper Chip, see Laura Gurak,

Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Market place

and the Clipper Chip (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

181NoteS­to­cHapter­3

91. Terranova, “Digital Darwin,” 71.

92. Ibid., 82. Though she laments the figuration, Terranova strangely adheres to

the ideology of the market as a “natural, self- evolving system” (82), “an indifferent,

flexible, demanding, yet, alas, ‘natural’ market- system” (83), what Julian Stallabrass

and others will call a “conservative view.” Stallabrass reads hacktivism as unwittingly

reinforcing “the conservative view of the market and its creatures as natural forces,”

in that the premise of this mode of political- artistic practice is that an attack prompts

“mutation,” structural adjustments that are read as transformative change (Internet

Art, 94).

93. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 156–57. Terra-

nova’s concern ultimately is the “removal of the physical body from the process of

communication” (“Digital Darwin,” 82), which prevents our seeing real- life power

differentials (this component of her argument situates her piece in proximate rela-

tion to the mid- 1990s discourse of identity and the Internet, of which representative

examples include Sherry Turkle, Julian Dibbell, and Lisa Nakamura). The interfaces

of biology and computing are of course not only metaphoric but also literal and the

province of research by Eugene Thacker and others. See Thacker’s Biomedia (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

94. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (London:

Collins, 1984), 83–85.

95. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Ori­

gins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 19. In the study, he periodizes the long

twentieth century with respect to finance capital: “As this approximate and prelimi-

nary periodization implies, consecutive systemic cycles of accumulation overlap, and

although they become progressively shorter in duration, they all last longer than a

century; hence the notion of the ‘long century,’ which will be taken as the basic tem-

poral unit in the analysis of world- scale processes of capital accumulation” (6–7).

Arrighi’s periodization of the long twentieth century is based on three periods of

crisis: the Great Depression of 1873–96, the thirty- year crisis of 1914–45, and the

economic crisis of the 1970s.

96. In contrast, Samir Amin argues that the current crisis of the world system

“reveals that the polarization of the world really constitutes a historic limit for capi-

talism.” Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 13.

97. Giovanni Arrighi, “Marxist Century–American Century: The Making and Re-

making of the World Labor Movement,” in Transforming the Revolution, ed. Samir

Amin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 55–56.

98. On the new Empire and the contemporary relations between American mili-

tary and economic power, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power

(New York: New Press, 2003); Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder, trans. Ames Hodges

(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (New

York: Verso, 2003); and Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2003).

182 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

99. Moreover, an analysis of the interface between global capitalism and new

technologies could only really be in the mode of the speculation, partly because there

are no strict answers for these questions, partly because of the uncertain futures of

the market, but also because the market and capital itself exist now in the mode of

global financial speculation, as do the new technologies, which cannot eliminate (or

shake off ) either vaporware or the system of initial public offerings (IPOs).

100. Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern

World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35.

101. Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Age of Transition: Trajec­

tory of the World­ System, 1945–2025 (London: Zed Books, 1996), 8.

102. Arrighi and Silver review the criticism linking chaos theory to changes in the

global political economy (Chaos and Governance, esp. 21–26). Also see Amin, Empire

of Chaos. In contrast, Joxe draws on the rhetoric of equilibrium in his commentary on

the question of the “end of capitalism” (Empire of Disorder, 189).

103. Hopkins and Wallerstein begin The Age of Transition with a section titled

“The World- System: Is There a Crisis?” Also see Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, and

Arrighi and Silver, Chaos and Governance, 2.

104. Arrighi and Silver, Chaos and Governance, 356.

105. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 82. Schumpeter sum-

marizes his position vis- à- vis Marx in a 1949 address: “Marx was wrong in his diag-

nosis of the manner in which capitalist society would break down; he was not wrong

in the prediction that it would break down eventually” (424–25). Though they focus

primarily on the efforts to prolong hegemony, and not on the successful hegemonic

runs, Hopkins and Wallerstein suggest a systemic logic similar to that articulated

by Arrighi for what they call the capitalist world- economy, whereby “the very efforts

made to prolong the power themselves tend to undermine the base of the power, and

thus start the long process of relative decline” (The Age of Transition, 9).

106. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 84, 87.

107. I am grateful to Alan Liu for pointing me to this passage in Schumpeter as

a means to bridge organicism and the language of complexity. The importance of

rhetoric and speech performance in Schumpeter’s analysis is underscored by Joan

Robinson, review of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Economic Journal 53

(December 1943): 381–83.

108. Bill Maurer, “Complex Subjects: Offshore Finance, Complexity Theory, and

the Dispersion of the Modern,” Socialist Review 25, nos. 3–4 (1995): 114–15.

109. Fernando Coronil, “Toward a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on

Capitalism’s Nature,” in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 79; Charles Sanford, “Financial Mar-

kets in 2020,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (1994), 1–10, http://w w w.kc.frb

.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/1q94sanf.pdf.

110. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 41.

183NoteS­to­cHapter­3

111. Guéhenno, End of the Nation­ State, 49.

112. Lee, “Structures of Knowledge,” 197.

113. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 360.

114. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 4. Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist

also counter the equilibrium theories of capitalism and suggest that economic systems

are instead flexible: “The market economy is ‘natural’: an unplanned but still highly

structured ecological system in a state of constant change.” Bard and Söderqvist,

Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life after Capitalism (London: Pearson Educa-

tion, 2002), 166.

115. For (often indirect) allusions to a complexity model, with implications of the

inconclusive, unpredictable, and nontotalizable, for the “global,” global culture, and

global orderings, see Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writ­

ing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 15; Hardt and

Negri, Empire, 41; Richard Lee, “Structures of Knowledge,” in The Age of Transition:

Trajectory of the World­ System, 1945–2025, ed. Terence Hopkins and Immanuel

Wallerstein (London: Zed Books, 1996), 197; and Arrighi and Silver, Chaos and Gov­

ernance. Alvin and Heidi Toffler make very general use of the chaos and complexity

paradigms in War and Anti­ War: Making Sense of Today’s Global Chaos (New York:

Little, Brown and Company, 1993). Ulf Hannerz also loosely links global culture to

complexity theory by arguing that “people like the cosmopolitans have a special part

in bringing about a degree of coherence; if there were only locals, world culture would

be no more than the sum of its separate parts.” Hannerz, Transnational Connections

(New York: Routledge, 1996), 111.

116. We can trace the emergence of the rhetoric of complexity, as does Taylor,

back to theories of Brownian motion and stock prices (early twentieth century), the

efficient- market hypothesis (EMH), and theories of market equilibrium (Confidence

Games, 244–48).

117. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of

Neoliberalism,” public seminar, Rice University (March 30, 2005).

118. Marx, Capital, 98.

119. An interesting counterpart here is Étienne Balibar’s commentary on our col-

lective fantasy, “the impression of a turning point in the history of civilization” pre-

cipitated by the emergence of multinational corporations, the collapse of the Soviet

socialist system, and the commingling of technical and natural components, such

that earth is imagined to have become a singular entity, a “ ‘system’ in which flows

of information, energy and matter influence one another.” Balibar, We, the People of

Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 103–5 (italics mine).

120. Geert Lovink, “Demystifying the Virtual Power Structures: An Interview

with Susan George,” in Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia,

by Geert Lovink (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 292.

184 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

121. George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons,

2003), 4.

122. Ibid., 10, 14, 32. See also the discussion of market fundamentalism in Soros,

Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (London: Little, Brown, 2000), 143–44,

196–98.

123. It is important to emphasize, as does Slavoj Žižek in a commentary on Kojin

Karatani, financial speculation and real production should not be read as mutually

exclusive. Both Karatani and Žižek reject any strict opposition between production

and speculation and read them rather in terms of “parallax.” Žižek, “The Parallax

View,” New Left Review 25 (January–February 2004): 121–34. On this third specula-

tive stage of capital, see Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” 246–65.

124. Also see Derek H. Aldcroft and Michael J. Oliver, Exchange Rate Regimes in

the Twentieth Century (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 1998). There is another

critical trajectory to follow with respect to the gold standard and the naturalizing of

finance: Jean- Joseph Goux’s The Coiners of Language aligns the decline of the gold

standard and the shift to paper money with the decline of literary realism, and in

response, Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money critiques Goux’s historical map

as naturalizing gold money.

125. Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 1986) draws

an extended analogy between the global financial system, particularly foreign ex-

change markets, and gambling for this very reason.

126. Philip G. Cerny, “The Dynamics of Financial Globalization: Technology, Mar-

ket Structure, and Policy Response,” Policy Sciences 27 (1994): 337. “Friction- free capi-

talism” and market efficiency are cited as the Information Age equivalent of trickle-

down economics. On the ideology of Bill Gates’s promise that the Internet would

approximate Adam Smith’s perfect market, see Žižek: “In the social conditions of late

capitalism, the very materiality of cyberspace automatically generates the illusory

abstract space of ‘friction- free’ exchange in which the particularity of the partici-

pants’ social position is obliterated” (The Plague of Fantasies, 156).

127. Jameson, “Culture,” 251; Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii.

128. Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973),

519; Otto Imken, “The Convergence of Virtual and Actual in the Global Matrix,” Vir­

tual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations, ed. Mike Crang, Phil Crang, and Jon

May (New York: Routledge, 1999), 99.

129. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso, 2002), 36. On elec-

tronic and virtual money, see Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? 49; Kevin Kelly’s chap-

ter on “e- money” in Out of Control; Kelly, “E- Money,” Whole Earth Review (Summer

1993); Keith Hart, Money in an Unequal World (New York: Texere, 2001), 203–29;

Geoffrey Ingham, “New Monetary Spaces?” in The Future of Money (Paris: Organisa-

tion for Economic Co- operation and Development, 2002), 123–45; Andrew Leyshon

and Nigel Thrift, Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (New

185NoteS­to­cHapter­3

York: Routledge, 1997), esp. 20–22; Elinor Solomon, Virtual Money: Understanding

the Power and Risks of Money’s High­ Speed Journey into Electronic Space (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997); and Keith Hart, Money in an Unequal World (New

York: Texere, 2001). Advocates of electronic forms of money (corporate currencies)

contribute to the challenge to the state’s control of currency popularized by Friedrich

Hayek’s The Denationalisation of Money (1978). Hayek suggests that market forces

would determine the value of privately issued currencies.

130. Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1992), 154. Here Taylor’s reading of the substance of money after

the collapse of the gold standard dovetails with the early Wired investment in the in-

substantiality of the electronic interface, the paradigmatic fictional register of which

is the Neuromancer trope of jacking in and transcending the “meat.” As redress to the

immateriality idea, Matt Kirschenbaum’s forthcoming book Mechanisms addresses

among other topics the forensics of electronic data.

131. Coronil, “Toward a Critique of Globalcentrism,” 63–87.

132. See Lynn Hershman, “The Raw Data Diet, All- Consuming Bodies, and the

Shape of Things to Come,” Leonardo 38, no. 3 (2005): 208–12; and Meredith Trom-

ble, ed., The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson (Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 2005).

133. Mary Poovey, “Residual Materialities,” paper for Digital Retroaction, Uni-

versity of California, Santa Barbara (September 2004), p. 26, http://dc- mrg.english

.ucsb.edu/conference/D_Retro/conference.html.

134. See Žižek on the fallacy of linear historical evolutionism and his critique

of progressivism inherent in historiographic paradigm offered by theorists of the

“netocracy” in Organs without Bodies. To a certain extent, the “netocracy” thesis mir-

rors Fukuyama’s polemic about the end of history and its suggestion that capitalism

has evolved into its perfect final form.

135. See Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, “The Project,” http://blackshoals.net/

project.html.

136. Cefn Hoile, “Black Shoals: Evolving Organisms in a World of Financial Data,”

in Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, chap. 5, n.p.

137. Fischer Black published “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities”

with Scholes in 1973 but died before the Nobel was awarded; Merton published “The-

ory of Rational Price Optioning” shortly after the Black- Scholes paper appeared. See

Mark Taylor’s discussion of LTCM in Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a

World without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 250. Also

particularly instructive is “Trillion Dollar Bet,” Nova, February 2000, http://w w w

.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stockmarket; as well as “The Midas Formula,” BBC2, December

1999, http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/midas.shtml.

138. Nicholas Dunbar, cited in Taylor, Confidence Games, 259. Also see Donald

Mackenzie, “How a Superportfolio Emerges: Long- Term Capital Management and

186 NoteS­to­cHapter­3

the Sociology of Arbitrage,” in The Sociology of Financial Markets, ed. Karin Knorr

Cetina and Alex Preda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62–83.

139. Autogena and Portway, “Thoughts behind the Project,” http://www.blackshoals

.net/Thoughts.html.

140. Nicholas Dunbar cited in Taylor, Confidence Games, 259.

141. “Feedback,” Principia Cybernetica Web, http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FEEDBACK

.html.

142. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1999), viii.

143. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 83.

144. Hoile, ““Black Shoals,” n.p.

145. Hoile’s development of the creatures was also informed by Karl Sims, Thomas

Ray’s Tierra, and Theo Jansen’s wind- powered beach animals, e.g., “Animaris Sabu-

losa.” See Theo Jansen’s site, http://w w w.strandbeest.com, as well as “Interview

with Theo Jansen,” artificial.dk (October 2005), http://w w w.artif icial.dk/articles/

theojansen.htm. On Karl Sims see N. Katherine Hayles, “Simulating Narratives: What

Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 1–26.

146. Anders Michelsen, “The fact of would- be worlds— comments on the Black

Shoals art project,” http://blackshoals.net/textpages/AndersText.html. William Grey

Walter, “An Imitation of Life,” Scientific American, May 1950, 42–45; Walter, “A

Machine That Learns,” Scientific American, August 1951, 60–63; Walter, The Liv­

ing Brain (New York: Norton, 1953); Owen E. Holland, “Grey Walter: The Pioneer

of Real Artificial Life,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on the

Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, ed. Christopher Langton (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

147. I am grateful to Katherine Hayles for posing a question about significance of

the material properties of stars in the context of this work.

148. Jaime Stapleton, “A Meditation on Cosmology, Artificial Life and the Aesthet-

ics of Political Economy,” http://blackshoals.net/textpages/JamieText.html.

149. Hoile, “Black Shoals,” n.p.

150. See Autogena and Portway, “The Project,” http://blackshoals.net/project.html.

151. Anthologies are often a visual confirmation of the centrality of intellectual

questions. We might thus note, as just one example, Claire Bishop’s recent anthology,

Participation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

152. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1984), 26.

187

A* algorithm, 19–20, 93

Aarseth, Espen, 90, 172n80

Abu Ghraib photos, 98

Afghanistan, war in, 68, 91–96, 101

Agamben, Giorgio, 38, 39, 160n25

agency, 27

agoraXchange, 85–86

ALife: and Black Shoals, 114, 125,

144–45, 147–49; and ecosystm,

118–20; and William Grey Walter,

147, 149

Allen, George, 129, 133

al-Massari, Mohammed, 82

al-Qaeda, 78

Al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 98

Amazon.com: search engine of,

hijacked, 18–19; visualization of

purchases on, 23–24

America’s Army, 82–83, 84, 88, 104;

Joseph DeLappe’s intervention in, 11,

16, 83, 103–7

Amoore, Louise, 163n60

Andreas, Peter: Border Games, 34–35

antiglobalization, 1, 48

Antiwargame, 88–89

antiwar games, 71, 84–89; ambiguity of,

90. See also persuasive games; war

games

Apter, Emily, 97, 119

Arendt, Hannah, 29

Arquilla, John, 45; Networks and

Netwears, 43, 162n41

Arrighi, Giovanni, 134, 178n65, 181n95;

and cycles of capitalism, 127, 128–29;

and ends of capitalism, 136, 137, 138;

The Long Twentieth Century, 136;

and mobility of capital, 121

Autogena, Lise. See Black Shoals

Bachelier, Louis, 126

Back to Israel: Wild West Bank, 88

Baker, Rachel: BorderXing Guide,

50–51

Balibar, Étienne, 183n119; on border

control, 34, 159n13; on citizenship,

52–53

Balkans: wars in, 68

Baran, Paul, 134

Bard, Alexander, 143

Battlefield 2: Special Forces, 74–76, 78

Baudrillard, Jean, 57; on virtual war,

66–67, 71, 90

Bauman, Zygmunt: on “liquid moder-

nity,” 53–54

Beck, Ulrich: and risk, 35

Becker, Konrad: Netbase/t0, 8–9

Bell, Daniel, 3

Bernhard, Hans: Amazon Noir, 18–19

Index

iNdex188

Bey, Hakim, 25

BitTorrent, 19

Blackmore, Tim: War X, 69

Black-Scholes formula, 110

Black Shoals (Autogena and Portway),

110–14, 142, 143, 146, 150–51; and

ALife, 114, 125, 144–45, 147–49; and

audience, 148–49; as critical, 116,

117; and “feedback effect,” 146

Bogost, Ian, 4, 85, 171n78

border control, 31–35, 47–51, 56–57, 61,

159n7, 159n13; and detainment of

Luis Hernandez, 61–63, 165n100,

165n103; as performance, 34, 35, 64.

See also Gatekeeper; immigration;

migrants; movement

border disturbance actions, 31–32,

35–38; and binaries, 36, 37–38

Border Film Project, 57

Borderhack, 163n55

Bourdieu, Pierre, 29

Bourriaud, Nicolas: Relational

Aesthetics, 12–13, 17, 27

Brand, Stewart: II Cybernetic Frontiers,

84

Brandon, Kayle: Status Project, 50–51,

165n103

Braudel, Fernand, 121, 135–36, 137

Bunting, Heath: BorderXing Guide,

50–51; Status Project, 50–51,

165n103

Bureau of Inverse Technology, 8, 9

Bürger, Peter, 151

Bush, George W., 2; Web site of,

hijacked, 7

Butler, Judith: on Abu Ghraib photos,

98; on migrants, 39–40; Precarious

Life, 38

CAE. See Critical Art Ensemble

California Ideology 2.0, 10

capital: materiality of, 123–24; move-

ment of, 32, 47, 121–22. See also

finance capitalism; labor

capitalism. See finance capitalism

Carbon Defense League, 6, 9

Card, Orson Scott: Ender’s Game, 84

Castells, Manuel, 3

Castronova, Edward, 80

Césaire, Aimé, 37

Cheney, Dick, 2

CHIPS, 132–33, 179n80

Clausewitz, Carl von, 87

Comaroff, Jean, 139–40

Comaroff, John, 139–40

complexity theory, 138–40. See also

finance capitalism

control, 20, 21–22, 118; Deleuze on, 22,

121; and risk, 35. See also power

Cootner, Paul H., 126

Coronil, Fernando, 138; on abstraction,

22, 142

Counter­Strike, 78, 80

Crandall, Jordan, 98–99

Crawford, Chris: on Space Invaders,

171n75

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), 13, 41, 62,

63; and defamiliarization, 36; and

electronic civil disobedience, 45;

and The Electronic Disturbance, 44;

and power, 1, 10, 11, 12, 43–44; and

street protest, 1, 44, 71; and Super

Kid Fighter, 16, 106; and tactics, 1,

6, 7–8, 10, 12, 15, 46

Crosser (Fajardo), 56–58

Cuarón, Alfonso: Children of Men, 28

Cubitt, Sean, 122

Cult of the Dead Cow, 41

cyberlibertarianism, 25, 158n73

cyberterrorism, 69, 73, 168n27; U.S.

government response to, 69, 74, 77

Daisenryaku 1941, 80

Dal Lago, Alessandro, 52

iNdex 189

Dartnell, Michael, 42

Darwin, Charles, 135. See also digital

Darwinism; social Darwinism

data visualization, 19–23, 71, 90–96,

100–105, 107; and agency, 115; and

audience, 93–96, 116; as critically

reflective, 114, 115, 116; of currency

exchange rates, 109–10, 117–21; as

disruptive, 116; as memorialization,

103; and power, 20, 21–22; and social

change, 115; and speculation, 114–15;

of the stock market, 110–15, 117, 125

dead­in­Iraq, 11, 16, 83, 103–7; as me-

morialization, 106; as mourning, 16;

War Poetry, 104. See also America’s

Army

de Certeau, Michel: The Practice of

Every day Life, 15–16, 18, 151,

156n44

De Landa, Manuel, 69–70, 130, 131, 147

DeLappe, Joseph. See dead­in­Iraq

Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 87, 115, 116; on con-

trol, 22, 121; on the event, 26

denial-of-service attacks, 41, 105, 150;

as destructive, 42, 62. See also

FloodNet; hacktivism; SWARM

the Minutemen

Department of Defense, 76, 78; visual-

ization of ordnance data of, 91

Department of Homeland Security,

38–39; detains Luis Hernandez,

61–63, 165n100, 165n103

Der Derian, James, 66, 67–68, 71, 84;

Antidiplomacy, 67

Derrida, Jacques, 184n124

Dewey, John, 131

digital Darwinism, 117, 134

DIY, 16, 17

DoEat (Department of Ecological

Authority Tactics): road signs of,

31–33, 36, 38, 47, 64

Dominguez, Ricardo, 41, 43–44, 45, 46,

54, 85, 165n91; Turista Fronterizo,

54–56, 63, 85

Eisenstein, Zillah, 123

electronic civil disobedience: and street

protests, 44–45; as symbolic, 45; as

temporary, 44, 45, 85

Electronic Civil Disobedience Group,

17, 26

Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT),

26, 37; and border disturbances, 37;

and decentralized modes of dissent,

59; and dematerialization, 54; and

hacktivism, 26, 161n33; and power,

44, 45, 54; and SWARM the Minute-

men, 33, 40–41, 42, 49, 72, 105,

161n29

Enron, 112–13

European Union: movement within,

50–51

event, the: and Deleuze, 26–27

Fajardo, Rafael, 57–58; Crosser, 56–58,

85, 88; La Migra, 56–58, 59, 85, 88

Fanon, Franz, 37

fashion: and protest, 29–30

finance capitalism, 51, 90–91, 92,

125–32, 182n99; biological meta-

phors for, 114, 117–20, 125, 126–32,

134, 147, 175n23, 178n73, 180n89,

181n92; and Black-Scholes formula,

110; and CHIPS, 132–33, 179n80;

and complexity, 138–40, 143–44,

183n115, 183n116; and currency

exchange, 109–10, 117–21, 141,

175n19, 184n124; and “cyberspace”

ideology, 134–35; and dematerial-

ization, 54, 109, 110, 122–24, 141,

176n48, 179n82, 185n130; disrup-

tion of, 116; and efficient markets,

126; embodiment of, 143; and

emergence, 143–44; and “feedback

iNdex190

effect,” 145–46, future of, 136–40,

144; and labor, 120, 123; “liquidity”

of, 54; and performativity, 133–34;

and self-regulation, 132–35, 180n83;

and social Darwinism, 131–32; and

stability, 121; and stock markets,

110–15, 117, 120, 123, 125, 177n52;

and SWIFT, 133

Flax, Carol: Tuesday Afternoon, 47–50

FloodNet, 13, 40–41, 43; as perfor-

mance, 42; as terrorism, 62

Flusser, Vilém, 46; on nomadism, 53

Foucault, Michel: on power, 20, 22, 118;

on revolution, 25, 45–46, 160n60

free trade, 32

Friedman, Thomas, 78–79; on “war of

ideas,” 81

Fuller, Matthew: Media Ecologies, 14

Full Spectrum Warrior, 70

Fusco, Coco, 42; Turista Fronterizo,

54–56, 63

Futurefarmers: Antiwargame, 88–89;

They Rule, 2, 3

Galloway, Alexander, 78; The Exploit,

11–12; Gaming, 105–6

games. See antiwar games; persuasive

games; war games; war simulations

Garcia, David, 11, 23; “The ABC of Tac-

tical Media,” 46

Gatekeeper, 31, 32–33, 159n7

George, Susan, 140

Gibson, William: Neuromancer, 67

Gibson-Graham, J. K., 130, 131

globalization, 3–4, 21, 120–21, 157n63;

and capital, 47, 139; and new media

art, 116. See also antiglobalization;

finance capitalism; movement

Goldman, Dan: Shooting War, 65–66, 67

Goux, Jean-Joseph, 184n124

Guattari, Félix, 8, 53

Guéhenno, Jean-Marie, 133, 138

Gulf War, 66, 67, 84, 95; Baudrillard on,

66, 90; protests against, 68

hacktivism, 5, 13, 26, 40–41; and terror-

ism, 62, 161n33; and war protests,

72. See also denial-of-service attacks

Halliburton, 2, 39

Hardt, Michael, 24, 116, 129, 138,

174n13; on Bartleby’s refusal, 25;

on control societies, 118; Empire,

120–21; on freedom of movement,

48, 52; on immaterial labor, 11;

Multitude, 44; on power, 54

Harken Energy, 2

Harris, Jerry, 122

Hernandez, Luis: Corridos, 58–62, 63;

detained by Homeland Security

agents, 61–63, 165n100, 165n103

Hoekstra, Pete, 73

Hofstadter, Richard, 131

Hoile, Cefn, 114, 144, 149

Hopkins, Terence, 136–37

Human Terrain System program, 70

Huntington, Samuel, 37, 81

IMF, 140

Imken, Otto, 130–31

immigration, 31–33, 42, 51; as class

struggle, 52; and free trade, 32.

See also border control; migrants;

movement

information economy, 3, 153n5

inSite_05, 37, 51, 54, 58, 61, 63

Institute for Applied Autonomy, 16

Interventionists, The, 18

Iqra Learning Center, 78

Iraq War, 68; and antiwar games, 84;

critical response to, 99–103; media

coverage of, 62; and nonstate actors,

71, 167n20; simulated, 65–66

iNdex 191

Iraq War Coalition Fatalities, 107

Islamgames, 79–80, 169n48

James, William, 131

Jameson, Fredric, 121, 127, 129, 136

Jevbratt, Lisa, 21

Jodi, 106

Karasic, Carmin, 41