Tiziana Terranova
Tiziana Terranova is Professor in Cultural Studies and Digital Media Theory in the Dipartimento di Scienze Umane e Sociali at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy. Her research interests concern the general intersection between science, technology, communication and culture from the perspective of critical theory and cultural studies. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004); After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (Semiotexte/MIT Press, 2022) and the forthcoming Network Social: on the Return of the Social in the Post-Digital age (Minnesota University Press). She is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Theory, Culture and Society (Sage), Media Theory (https://mediatheoryjournal.org/), Subjectivity (Palgrave), and Studi Culturali (Il Mulino). She is a member of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at L’Orientale, and co-founder of the Critical Computation Bureau (CCB), and of the Centro di Ricerca Interuniversitario sulle Tecnoculture Transnazionali (CRiTT).
Publication Contribution
Staging and Countering Machine StatesOne possible way to characterise contemporary art is by noticing its intense relation with the domain of the theoretical and the conceptual, as well as its active experimentation with the aesthetic possibilities afforded by the material potential of a wide range of expressive media. The kind of contemporary art that works with computers presents peculiar challenges. Here, the relation between the theoretical and the material is ever more intense, while the very distinction is ever more difficult to maintain.
As media, computers are themselves dense entwinements of the most abstract and the most material: they are the most elaborate and multi-layered logical machines – with their own diagrams and languages – enmeshed in the quantum level of electrons as well as the physical properties of inorganic matter. The computational medium is a monad that enfolds time, matter, energy and meaning, entailing its own point of view on the world. Different material, semiotic and symbolic temporalities are entangled in its black-boxed interior, as well as in its crowded interfaces and bright screens. As computers have become connected and social, the merging of the computational medium with the network form has transformed the whole world in ways that one still struggles to understand.
In a way, Machine States by Critical Tech Group deploys the computational medium in a basic, early network form. It displays a close network of computers that resembles the first state-financed computer network, ARPANET, more than the gigantic constellation of the Corporate Platform Complex with its expanding galaxies of global connectivity. It does so in order to simulate the operation of that specific network-like form constituted by the limited set of nation-states and their relations. In this way, it stages a basic Gedankenexperiment: what if the chaos of the contemporary world, with its bloody wars for the control of land and resources, was but an effect of the state form becoming machine-like, and international relations (as well as the global economy) becoming networked? Have states become computational machines that engage in their own data mining and processing, performing calculations to maximise their competitiveness in relation to other states? What if one could actually stage – using that peculiar entwinement of the abstract and the material afforded by the computational medium – how and what the contemporary state sees, both in relation to its citizens and in relation to other states?
Turning the tradition of ‘red’ socialist cybernetics around, the artwork Machine States considers the possibility of staging the computational workings of contemporary states, which persist in spite of the delamination of sovereignty imposed by the Corporate Platform Complex. While socialist cyberneticians believed that cybernetics could make states more efficient at the task of producing plenty for all than the market’s supposedly self-regulating order, Critical Tech Group operates in the aftermath of the computational becoming reactionary. States have morphed into actual cybernetic machines, generating a new type of state form as such. As the boundary between the technical and the political – between machines, markets and states – implodes, competition turns into war, and users are traced, captured and recruited. In the background, the techno-reactionary fantasy of the network-state looms, promising a freedom restricted only to those who can afford the choice of leaving or staying. Other questions linger: can a new kind of democratic socialism reclaim the computational state? And what kind of revolution can be waged against a computational technostate?