Zones of Offensive Opacity: an essay on carnival, invisibility and e-scapism
J18 - “Our resistance is as transnational as Capital”
“Those in authority fear the mask for their power partly resides in identifying, stamping and cataloguing in knowing who you are. But a carnival needs masks, thousands of masks and our masks are not to conceal our identity but to reveal it…
The masquerade has always been an essential part of Carnival. Dressing up and disguise, the blurring of identities and boundaries, transformation and transgression are all brought together in the wearing of masks. Masking up releases our commonality, enables us to act together, to shout as one to those who rule and divide us “we are all fools, deviants, outcasts, clowns and criminals”.
The wearing of a mask symbolises the rejection of the cult of personality so crucial to consumer capitalism and reminds us that beneath the mask of the present social order, the shiny surface that distracts and blinds, lies the real face of capitalism and the state: bombs, armies, prisons, courts, profit, enclosure and oppression.
While the elite gangs of the state and capital become evermore faceless their fear of the face of everyday resistance grows. The search for the resisters intensifies with endless CCTV cameras unmasking new devices that can pick out and identify a single face in the growing crowd. Yet, somehow, the victims of the power - the poor, the oppressed, the broken and desolate - are always voiceless and are always faceless. Today we shall give this resistance a face; for by putting on our masks we reveal our unity; and by raising our voices in the street together, we speak our anger at the facelessness of power.
The Crime and Disorder Act of April 1999 gives the police new powers of arrest if you do not “remove any item which the constable reasonably believes you are wearing wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing your identity”. But a removed mask can be legally put back on and a “seized” mask can legally be replaced. This mask is for entertainment purposes only…
On the signal follow your color Let the Carnival begin…”(1)
These were the words printed on the back of a paper mask handed out in four different colors to the thousands of demonstrators gathered at the Liverpool Street train station in London on June 18, 1999, to take part in the international day of action passed into history as J18 or Carnival Against Capital.
Inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and People Global Action (PGA) - a decentralized network of social movements carrying on campaigns and direct actions for social and environmental justice and against the uprising corporate globalization - J18 has been one of the first huge anti-globalization days of protests at the turn of the second and third millennia. Along with the first Global Action Days during the second WTO ministerial conference in Geneva, the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, and the G8 summit protests in Genoa in the summer of 2001, J18 was conceived as a transnational, decentralized format of protests generally held in coincidence with summits or conferences of international and intergovernmental organizations (such as the G8 or WTO).
Organized on the occasion of the 25th G8 summit in Cologne, Germany, J18 Carnival Against Capital saw the organization of events and demonstrations in 43 countries across the globe, from the UK to Australia, to Belarus, and Uruguay. (2)
Under the slogan “our resistance is as transnational as capital” the main objective of the mobilization was to bring together as many diverse groups and movements as possible, independently from their geographical or political position. The idea was to reproduce the increasingly networked, decentralized, and global nature of capitalism and financial markets in a completely different context, by building an international coalition of autonomous resistant groups across the world, also thanks to the emergence of new communication technologies such as the internet and e-mails.
“Whether you are campaigning for workers rights, wilderness defence, the environment, or animal rights; or against the arms trade, sweatshops, third world debt, or whatever; your fight is against global capitalism and neo-liberalism”.
This new network of resistance, sometimes referred to as a ‘movement of movements’, was born in the summer of 1996 as 6,000 people gathered deep in the Lacandón Jungle of Chiapas for the first Intercontinental Encuentro (or, Encounter) for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism. (4)
The proposal for J18 came from the British activist collective Reclaim the Streets (RTS) (5), which had been organizing street parties and non-violent street reclaiming direct actions during the previous years. On the ashes of the 1983 and 1984 Stop the City demonstrations, described as a protest and carnival against war, oppression and exploitation, activists from RTS, Earth First! and people from London Greenpeace (not the NGO) started working toward J18 as an international day of protest by organizing a number of open monthly meetings in London and by setting up a website and a mailing list allowing for transnational coordination and information exchange.
The demonstrations in London involved more than 10000 people and an eclectic coalition of autonomous organizations, from animal rights protestors picketing McDonald's to anti-arms trade activists who staged a die-in chaining themselves to Lloyds Bank, to the Association of Autonomous Astronauts beginning its 10-day festival Space 1999: Ten Days Which Shook The Universe with a blockade of the Lockheed Martin offices against space privatization and militarization.
In the afternoon four different marches of partying protestors, guided by some affinity groups, departed from Liverpool Street Station to converge in LIFFE (London London International Financial Futures Exchange), one of the most important financial hubs in the city of London, in turn one of the most heavily surveilled square miles in the world (6), where a sound system had already been set up. Before the festive atmosphere turned into a violent battle between riot police and protesters, some of the latter managed to set off a fire hydrant to symbolize the liberation of the lost river Walbrook, brick up the front of the LIFFE building, and occupy its ground floor.
Carnivalesque and Invisibility
Finding actualization in rave culture and the illegal street parties of the 90s, carnival as a form of protest has been an integral element of the anti-globalization movement, returning as a recurring element in the days of global action following J18, from Seattle to Genoa, and influencing subsequent waves of protest such as the one of Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
“Why puppets? Why windows?” (7) is the question that anthropologist and activist David Graeber poses himself questioning the hidden rules behind symbolic warfare and the forms of revolutionary politics carried on by the antiglobalization movement. What do the faceless, black anonymous figures of a Black Bloc have to do with the colorful giant papier-maché puppets used for street parades and blockades during the various carnivals against capitalism?
By tracing a direct line between the Black Bloc and that revolutionary/artistic tradition that passes through Dadaism, Surrealism, and Situationism, Graeber analyzes how both the idea of creative destruction and that of the revolutionary festival - contained in the two-folded image of the potlatch - contributed to the emergence of the carnivaleseque as an anticapitalist form of protest.
“If Black Blocs embody one side of this tradition—capitalism’s encouragement of a kind of fascination with consumerist destruction that can, ultimately, be turned back against capitalism itself— the Puppets surely represent the other one, the recuperation of the sacred and unalienated experience in the collective festival.” (8)
If property destruction symbolizes the dismantling of the illusionary and aestheticized immortality of the spectacle as well as a way to exorcise capitalist violence, the ridiculousness and the ephemerality of the costumes, the props, and the puppets “are the mockery of the idea of monument”. (9)
It is properly the refusal of the static and embellished images produced by capitalism that lies at the foundation of the carnivaleseque as a resistant practice of simultaneous creation and destruction, where the subversion of ordinary hierarchies leaves space for the rupture of everyday alienation by bringing back bodies, in their hedonistic and vulgar dimension, to public space.
Identifying the theoretical lineage of the radical activism of the 90s in the work of Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World), Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life), and Bey (TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism), Gavin Grindon discusses the relation between carnival and its revolutionary potential and in particular their common vision on joy and desire as the “essential component of carnival’s undogmatic suspension of normal social relations.” (10) Incorporating elements from the radical critique of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Situationist concept of the Spectacle and the theories of biopolitics and subjective labor inherent in the Autonomist Marxist tradition, the carnival as a form of protest against neoliberal globalization is characterized by two main elements:
1) The breakdown of any predetermined social roles and hierarchy and the creation of a collective social subject comparable to the one of the Multitude discussed by Hardt and Negri in their eponymous work (11). Thus, a plural and multiple subject, made up of different singularities (not reducible to a sameness), though able to act in common. An organizational model that, by corresponding to the networked and decentralized structure of contemporary capitalist economic and social production, can act as a weapon against it calling on democracy as its political foundation. Ultimately, a subject that is not reducible to the indistinctness of the mass nor the sacralization of the individual advanced by capitalism.
2) A process of exodus from the ubiquitous and pervasive forces of biopolitical exploitation and capitalist surveillance or, in other words, the creation of a zone of offensive resistance, the occupation of a “new place in the non-place” (12) of the Empire and the Spectacle. Through its rituality, the carnival provides a liminal space for the dismantling of ruling power structures and the re-appropriation of the material infrastructures hidden behind the opaque layers of the global economy and technocratic regimes.
If the simultaneously singular and plural nature of the multitude constitutes the pre-condition for the production of the common as a response to capitalist individualization, exodus represents the performative act of desertion and re-appropriation of the physical and emotional places of biopolitical exploitation of desire. In a short section of their volume, titled “Carnival and Movement”, Hardt and Negri point out how the carnivaleseque dimension of anti-globalization protests lies “not only in their atmosphere but also in their organization” (13), that is networked and distributed. This aspect allows us to establish a connection between the carnivaleseque and the networkization or dematerialization of resistant practices that extend to contemporaneity.
The process towards invisibility and abstraction that characterized the evolution of late-capitalism infrastructures, from the cloudification of networks to the emergence of algorithmic governance, went along with the evolution of media activism and hacktivist practices - employing anonymity and invisibility as tactical weapons - that constitute a continuation of the political and artistic lineages traced by Graeber and Grindon. Exploring these genealogies, the following paragraphs will respectively delve into the concepts of multitude and exodus to analyze the evolution of biopolitical subjectivation and colonization mechanisms enacted by capitalism, as well as the elaboration of critical responses delineated by what Boltanski and Chiapello term "the artistic critique." (14)
On becoming a whatever singularity
“Here I am, caught in the super-tight meshwork of the new power. In the impalpable net of the new police: THE IMPERIAL POLICE OF QUALITIES.
There is a whole network of devices in which I slip to "get integrated", and that incorporates these qualities in me. A whole petty system of mutual filing, identification and surveillance. A whole diffuse prescription of absence. A whole machinery of comporte/mental control, which aims at panoptism, at transparential privatization, at atomization. And in which I struggle.
I need to become anonymous. In order to be present. The more anonymous I am, the more present I am.” (15)
— Tiqqun 2, Zone of Offensive Opacity.
Issued in two volumes from 1999 to 2001, Tiqqun has been a french-italian philosophical zine and editorial collective associated with ultra-left and anarchist positions. The journal - which became popular with the arrest of Julien Coupat, one of the first issue’s contributors, and other members of the anarchist group Tarnac Nine (16) - has been often associated with the work of the anonymous collective The Invisible Committee (17), presenting several intersections with it.
Drawing on the work of Foucault and Agamben and setting itself in the historical continuum of radical movements traced so far, the work of Tiqqun collocates in the context of the artistic critique, questing for authenticity and liberation from the oppressive and illusionary nature of capitalism. It is by denouncing the increasingly networked, diffused, and opaque infrastructures underpinning the global economy and transnational centers of power that the authors call on invisibility and opacity as guerrilla tactics. Going unseen, getting away from the pervasive mechanism of surveillance and categorization employed by neoliberal regimes for the accumulation of value, through the creation of "zones of offensive opacity” (18), thus by assuming the same characteristics of the system, is presented as the only way to become unintelligible for it. The refusal of the self, the individual identity, and the modern concept of the author is the premise for a harsh critique of the virtual promise of liberation evoked by neoliberal identity politics and its commodification of “difference”.
Infinite segmentation, the endless production of labels and ready-to-wear identities through which affirm our uniqueness as individuals is the downside of advanced capitalism's obsession with identification, recognition, and quantification. Becoming a “whatever singularity” (19), becoming anonymous through the experience of desubjectivation is for Tiqqun the only way to escape what Foucault defines as “government through individualization.” (20)
The extract quoted at the beginning of this paragraph, taken from the lyrical piece “How is it to be done?” placed at the close of the second issue of Tiqqun, recalls the words printed on the back of the paper masks distributed during J18. The act of masking up, as well as the one of becoming anonymous, are not acts of concealment, but rather of affirmation. Of presence. Unfolding the awareness of the resistant power of the multitude.
Twenty years later, the process of opacization, abstraction, and dematerialization of the networked infrastructures that regulate social life - from communication networks to global logistics protocols - appears more tangible than ever. The penetration of neoliberal politics into the realm of the internet led to the proliferation of surveillance systems, data mining mechanisms, and algorithmic governance together with a brand new set of subjectivation tools aimed at nurturing the narcissistic cult of personality, from beautification filters to DNA testing for “ancestry and traits” (21), based on the extraction and storage of biometric and genomic data.
Today’s Selfie is Tomorrow's Biometric Profile is an essay written by artist and software engineer Adam Harvey for the exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm hosted in 2022 at HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) in Dortmund (22). The article, introduced by a 3D scan of the Ephebe Narcissus realized by the author, reflects on the interdependence between the spreading of facial surveillance technologies and the surplus of selfies available online, questioning the practices through which facial training datasets are created by government and private agencies. Most of the images employed to train public facial recognition systems are generally scraped from platforms such as Instagram and Flickr without any consent of the subjects represented.
Transformed into a mirror installation the title of Harvey’s article became part of his ongoing project Think Privacy, a campaign to “raise awareness about emerging issues in an era of exuberant data collection” (23). The work of Harvey flawlessly unveils the loop between the relentless push towards overexposure and hypervisibility exercised by the logic of social media platforms and the deregulation inherent in data-mining practices.
Eluding surveillance systems, becoming imperceptible, performing the non-place through camouflage turn to be, even in Harvey's work, the primary tactics for resisting neoliberal subsumption paradigms His work HyperFace, developed in collaboration with the design duo Hyphen-Labs and debuted in 2017 at Sundance Film Festival, is a camouflage pattern aimed at reducing the confidence score of facial detection, employing false faces to distract the algorithm by exploiting its expectations. Extending the concept developed with his previous work CVDazzle (24) - a set of camouflage techniques that employ hairstyling and makeup to block face detection - Harvey turns promiscuity into a weapon against the voyeuristic obsession of the surveillance economy. Once again, the masquerade seems to return under a new form as a tool for producing a resistant subjectivity, which by becoming anonymous, invisible, and, namely, "whatever", constitutes itself as a multitude.
Occupying Performing the non-place
“No place in this society is revolutionary in itself anymore. The common person occupies the place of the placeless, and it’s the only one anyone can revolt from” (25)
— Tiqqun 2, Zone of Offensive Opacity
If the affective nature of biopolitical exploitation processes allowed capital to extend its rule to what Italian Autonomia has called the "social factory" (26), such expansion led to the complete annihilation of the boundaries between an inside and an outside to capital. By relying on a de-localized, networked, and increasingly abstract infrastructure global capitalism manifests itself as a ubiquitous and placeless entity.
Re-appropriating the non-place means, before anything, performing it to unveil the materiality of its exploitation and value extraction processes. “What if planetary-scale computation could be performed by occupying its spaces and bending its tempos?” (27) is the question that researcher and curator Bani Brusadin asks himself in his essay The Fog of Systems. What if staging the hierarchies and geometries hidden behind the opaque layers of power infrastructures could support the production of new topologies and cartographies to inform and re-orient practices of resistance and re-appropriation?
As already discussed in the previous paragraphs, one of the key elements of the carnivalesque as a form of protest is the enactment of a process of exodus from sovereign power structures through the creation of a whole new set of spatiotemporal coordinates able to counteract and evade the existing dominant representation systems and maps, presented as models of reality.
This idea of exodus becomes tangible in Konrad Becker’s concept of escapism faced in his short essay Gravity and E-Scape (28), part of the proceedings of the second Intergalactic Conference of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts hosted in Vienna in 1997 in the spaces of Public Netbase (29):
“Lockpicking the future requires multi-dimensional maps of the world for new exits and safe havens in hyperspace; it needs passports to allow travels from normative, global reality to parallel cultures and invisible nations, it requires nomad supply stations on the routes taken by the revolutionary practice of aimless flight; it needs psycho-geographical maps that show the way to Dreamtime and public transport to Kaddath.” (30)
The AAA was a community-based space program launched in 1995 as a five-year mission to set up a worldwide network of autonomous groups dedicated to building their own spaceships. Conceptualized as a multiple name or, in AAA's terms, as a “collective phantom” (31) operating in the broader context of popular culture rather than limited to artistic practices, the mission's primary goal was to fight against the monopoly of corporations, governments, and the military over space exploration.
Embodying the decentralized and rhizomatic spirit of the antiglobalization movement, the AAA developed as a non-hierarchical network of local community-based groups aiming at “moving in several directions all at once” (32). In a mix of psychogeography, cyberculture, and raving the AAA’s radical attempt to democratize space traveling was deeply political. By calling on the re-appropriation of outer space through the “institution of a science fiction of the present” (33), the AAA has been able to produce a new speculative playground and occupy a new emotional, conceptual as well as physical, and political space.
During its five years of activity, before its programmed dissolution in 2000, the AAA network has been busy publishing annual reports, bulletins and setting up mailing lists to facilitate exchange among the different groups. Besides the organization of the already mentioned 10-day festival Space 1999 on the occasion of J18, two Intergalactic Conferences have been hosted respectively at Public Netbase in Vienna in 1997 (34) and at Link Center in Bologna in 1998 (35). The conferences gathered autonomous astronauts from different countries to discuss the possibilities of independent interplanetary exploration through talks, rave-in-space training sessions, film projections, and three-sided football matches. (36)
To celebrate the Vienna conference, Oceania AAA - a London-based group of astronauts running an interstellar free radio called Radio Free Earth (37) - announced the launch of some volunteer astronauts at selected stars and galaxies accompanied by a 100-pixel square GIF file of their own construction (or image) and the message "WE'RE COMING" (38). The Oceania AAA launchpad, and the REF project, were located in South East London and reclaimed as a space for launches and broadcasts into space as a response to spatial surveillance operations such as the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, a program financed by the US Government that employed radio frequencies transmission to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
For AAA, the re-appropriation of the non-place of global capital passes through the creation of a performative space of antagonism from which it is possible not only to unveil the power relations and materiality of contemporary colonialism but mostly to imagine more democratic alternatives to it. Escapism and speculative fiction become the weapons of a semiotic guerrilla that refuses the constructs we are socialized into, producing a new cognitive and political space of resistance.
On the 7th of April 2022, the astrophysical community identified one of the most distant objects ever observed, HD1, a proposed high-redshift galaxy situated at a distance of 13.463 billion light-years from Earth. In its 2022 installation, The Fall, Spanish artist Mario Santamaria created an avatar in the Voxels - Ethereum Virtual World metaverse and placed it at the same distance as HD1 from Earth. From there, the avatar jumps and is projected into a deep fall to the meta-terrestrial surface that, at the speed of light, would take thirteen and a half billion years to complete, and that at the speed of the jumping avatar, which is approximately one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, will not be completed for some eighty-nine thousand thirty-eight billion three hundred and seventy thousand twenty-six million years. (39)
The avatar’s jump into the meta-void of Voxels world presents itself to the observer as an unreadable sequence of abstract and glitched images accompanied by an unsettling white noise. Its high-speed fall makes it impossible to identify both the avatar’s body and the space that it crosses. The collapse of the image expresses the limits of representation models and the unbridgeable gap between the vectorial epistemic regime of techno-capitalism and lived experience. De-visuality emerges as a tool, used by Santamaria to reveal the materiality and constraints of capitalist infrastructure, be it the expanded potentiality of perception provided by technological devices such as super telescopes or the eternal digital existence granted by the metaverse. The Fall is a response to the illusionary capitalistic promise to transcend human life. The glitch, as a kind of performative non-place, becomes the "place of the placeless" evoked by Tiqqun as a site of resistance, an "interference in the production of hegemonic images" (40) capable of paving the way for an exodus from the sites of imperial sovereignty.
Beyond the politics of difference
“Displace aIl reduction. Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.” (41) — Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
To put it in Edouard Glissant’s terms, going beyond the “transparency of ideas” that lies at the bottom of Western thought and that tasks shape into the rationalizing power of neoliberal technocracy and its protocols, requires not only to acknowledge the right to difference but to take it further. Eluding surveillance technologies as well as producing counter-cartographies of the present that oppose the abstract and pretentious universality of representational models implies a descent into the immeasurable, the unidentifiable, and the incomprehensible.
In an era where visuality has become the battlefield of identity politics and visibility acts as the “common currency of our time” (42) by turning the notions of difference and minority identity into the main vehicles for capitalist subsumption, reclaiming one’s right to opacity appears fundamental to formulate an effective critique and contestation of sovereign power structures.
Notes
1 “Today in London’s festive history, 1999: J18, the Carnival Against Capitalism”, Past Tense, June 18, 2020 →
2 Archived Global J18 Site →
3 “J18 1999. Our resistance is as transnational as capital”, Days of Dissent!, 2004. Archived from the original on 1 March 2007. →
4 “The Emergence of a Global Movement”, Days of Dissent!, May 8, 2005. →
5 Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is a collective and direct action network advocating for community ownership of public spaces. Originating in 1990s London, it emerged from anti-road protest camps at sites like Claremont Road and Twyford Down. RTS frequently organizes non-violent street reclaiming actions and illegal street parties to promote alternative uses of urban spaces, prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and community activities over motorized vehicles. →
6 Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (Verso, 2003)
7 David Graeber, “On the phenomenology of giant puppets: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture”, The Anarchist Library, 2007,
8 Graeber, Ibid., 23.
9 Graeber, Ibid., 7.
10 Gavin Grindon, “Carnival Against Capital: A Comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem, and Bey,” Anarchist Studies 12:2 (2004): 148
11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004)
12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2000), 216.
13 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Ibid.
14 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso Books, 2018).
15 Tiqqun, “How is it to be done?, Tiqqun 2: Zone of Offensive Opacity, 2001.
16 Tarnac Nine was a group of individuals who were arrested in France in November 2008 and accused of being involved in terrorist activities. The arrests were part of a broader police operation targeting anarchist and radical leftist groups. The name “Tarnac Nine” comes from the small village of Tarnac in central France, where several of the individuals lived and where they were arrested. The group was accused of sabotage, specifically of conspiring to sabotage France’s high-speed rail network.
17 The Invisible Committee is a collective of anonymous writers whose work has gained attention for its radical critiques of contemporary society and its advocacy for revolutionary change. They first emerged with the publication of their manifesto “The Coming Insurrection” in 2007, which gained notoriety for its provocative ideas and calls for collective action against capitalism, consumerism, and the state.
18 Tiqqun. Ibid.
19 Tiqqun. Ibid., 746.
20 Cited in Érik Bordealau, Foucault Anonymat (Le Quartanier, 2014),
21 23andMe Holding Co. is a publicly trading personal genomics and biotechnology company based in South San Francisco, California. It is best known for providing a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service in which customers provide a saliva sample that is laboratory analysed to generate reports relating to the customer’s ancestry. At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it’s working to verify the data. In October 2023, Wired reported that a sample of data points from 23andMe accounts were exposed on BreachForums, a black-hat hacking crime forum. →
22 Adam Harvey, “Today’s selfie is tomorrow biometric’s profile” in House of Mirrors. Artificial Intelligence as a Phantasm, Austellung-Magazins 2022/1 →
23 Adam Harvey, Think Privacy →
24 Adam Harvey, CV Dazzle →
25 Tiqqun. Ibid., 731
26 The Social factory is a concept developed by Italian autonomist Marxism in the 1960s to help analyze how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole.
27 Bani Brusadin, The Fog of Systems. Art as Reorientation and Resistance in a Planetary-Scale System Disposed Towards Invisibility (Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2021), 50.
28 Konrad Becker, “Gravity and E~scape (excerpts from the art of e~scape)” in Third Annual Report of the AAA, Future Non Stop →
29 Public Netbase was a cultural media initiative, open access internet platform, media art space, and advocate for the development of electronic art founded by Konrad Becker and Francisco de Sousa Webber in Vienna. It was founded in 1994 as a non-profit internet provider and a platform for the participatory use and critical analyses of information and communication technology. Its parent organization was the Institute for New Culture Technologies-t0, founded in 1993.
30 Becker. Ibid.
31 Brian Holmes, “Unleashing the Collective Phantoms. Flexible Personality, Networked Resistance”, Transversal, December 2002. →
32 Jason Skeet, “Moving in Several Directions at Once”, AAA Archive on deepdisc.com →
33 Holmes. Ibid.
34 Luther Blisset, “Raido AAA Vienna Conference Report by Luther Blissett”, Archive pages for Raido AAA group, 1995-2000 →
35 Luther Blisset, “Bologna Intergalactic Conference Report”, Archive pages for Raido AAA group, 1995-2000 →
36 Three-sided football, also known as trilateral football or trikala, is a variant of traditional football (soccer) played with three teams instead of two. The game was conceptualized by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn, a member of the avant-garde art movement, and it embodies some of the principles of situationist philosophy, such as disrupting established norms and encouraging creativity and participation.
37 Oceania Association of Autonomous Astronauts (OAAA), “Radio Free Earth”, DeepDiscMedia Planetary Exploration Division, 23 May, 1999. →
38 Oceania Association of Autonomous Astronauts (OAAA), “WE’RE COMING! Oceania AAA contribution to the first annual conference of the AAA in Vienna”, DeepDiscMedia Planetary Exploration Division, 23 June, 1997. →
39 Mario Santamaria, The Fall, 2022. →
40 Mario Santamaría, Gàrgola, 29 Oct 2022 – 05 Feb.2023, Centre d’Art La Panera, Lleida. →
41 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
42 Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency (Penguin Press, 2019)
Further readings
1 Balli, R. (1998) Anche tu astronauta. Roma: Castelvecchi.
2 Barthes, R. (1967) ‘Death of the author’, Aspen, 5-6.
3 Berger, E. (2021) Accelerazione. Correnti utopiche da Dada alla CCRU. Produzioni Nero
4 Bey, H. (1991). The Temporary Autonomous Zone. 2nd edn. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
5 Blissett, L. (2000) Mind Invaders. Come fottere i media: manuale di guerriglia e sabotaggio culturale. Roma: Castelvecchi.
6 Blissett, L. (1996) Totò, Peppino e la Guerra Psichica. Materiali dal Luther Blissett Project.
7 Brusadin, B. et al. (2016) The Black Chamber surveillance, paranoia, invisibility & the internet. Brescia: Link Editions.
8 Calabrò Visconti, L. and Almare. (2019) ‘A Brief History of Invisibility’, NERO Magazine, 19 October. Available at: https://www.neroeditions.com/a-brief-history-of-invisibility/
9 Dogheria, D. and Zingoni, S. (2021) Luther Blissett. Bibliografia di una guerra psichica. Pitigliano: le Strade Bianche di Stampa Alternativa
10 Fontaine, C. (2017) Lo sciopero umano e l’arte di creare la libertà. DeriveApprodi.
11 Foucault, M. (1979) ’Authorship: What is an Author?’, Screen, 20 (1), pp 13–34.
12 The Invisible Committee. (2009) The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
13 Metaheaven. (2014). Black Transparency. The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance. Sternberg Press.
14 Metaheaven and Archey, K. (2018) PSYOP: An Anthology. Koenig Books.
15 Tencons, C. (2011) ‘Occupy Wall Street: Carnival Against Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility’, E-Flux Journal, 30.
16 Terranova, T. (2014) Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common
17 Tiqqun (1999). Tiqqun, Organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire: Exercices de Métaphysique Critique
18 Tiqqun (2001). Tiqqun, Organe de liaison au sein du Parti Imaginaire: Zone d’Opacité Offensive
Websites
1 Archive pages for Raido AAA group, 1995-2000. {https://www.uncarved.org/AAA/}
2 Association of Autonomous Astronauts Vienna {http://aaa.t0.or.at/}
3 Oceania AAA {https://deepdisc.com/aaa/}
4 Reclaim the Streets {https://rts.gn.apc.org/ideas.html}
5 J18 Official Global Website {https://bak.spc.org/j18/site/links2.html}
6 Disconaut AAA {https://www.uncarved.org/disconaut/}